Amid the turbulence in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati made one more big change in the party days after expelling her nephew Akash Anand. On Wednesday, the former Uttar Pradesh CM appointed the old party hand Randhir Singh Beniwal as the party's second national coordinator, replacing her brother and Akash’s father Anand Kumar who had been appointed to the post just two days earlier. Beniwal, 55, who joined the BSP three decades ago assumes the leadership position at a critical time. While the BSP remains the preeminent party of Dalits, with a dedicated vote bank in UP, it does not have a single Lok Sabha seat at present and only 2.06% vote share nationally. In the 2022 UP Assembly elections, the party bagged just one seat, with a vote share of 12.88%, a drastic fall from the 20%-plus vote share it would usually get in the state. Mayawati is banking on Beniwal’s long association with the party to help it get back on track. Starting from the BSP's Saharanpur unit, Beniwal climbed the party ladder and worked with both party founder Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. Beniwal is a Jatav, the Dalit community Mayawati belongs to, and is known to have his ear to the ground. In the past, Beniwal has called himself a “cadre ka sipahi (a soldier of the cadre).” And Mayawati seems to be closely defining and monitoring Beniwal’s role. He is expected to look after the party state units in Haryana, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, West Bengal, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and parts of western UP. Gautam, on the other hand, has been assigned the task of traveling across India to connect with the party’s supporters, collect reports of party workers, and ensure the execution of Mayawati's directives on the ground. How he came to join BSP Beniwal’s father was a village pradhan and was given the responsibility by Kanshi Ram to strengthen the government employees’ body BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Community Employees’ Federation) in Saharanpur. Beniwal formally joined the BSP in 1990. Three years later, Beniwal says, he got the opportunity to meet Mayawati for the first time. He went on to work for the booth, sector, Assembly, and district teams of the BSP and was elected the Saharanpur councillor in 2001 and 2006. A year after the BSP came to power in UP with an absolute majority in 2007. Beniwal was elected to the Saharanpur district planning committee. In 2014, when the party drew a blank in the Lok Sabha elections, he was the Saharanpur in-charge. He was later made the party's sub-committee in-charge in Saharanpur and Meerut and in 2018, he became the Punjab in-charge. During the recent Delhi Assembly polls, in which the BSP contested under the supervision of Akash Anand, Beniwal was responsible for monitoring 10 seats. Beniwal runs a business in western UP and Uttarakhand, providing power generators on rent.
