‘Half Akhilesh, half Ambedkar’: Why an SP poster has BJP, BSP fuming

“The SP government renamed districts that were named after Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram while top SP leaders referred to the BSP government-built Ambedkar memorial in Lucknow as ‘ayyashi ka adda (place for debauchery)’. The poster is a grave insult to Baba Saheb,” Pal said.

Drama unfolded after the poster was put up outside the party headquarters in Lucknow on Monday by the SP’s frontal organisation Samajwadi Lohia Vahini.

The Vahini’s president, Abhishek Yadav, defended the move saying, “Akhilesh ji is the only one who can fulfil Ambedkar’s dreams of ensuring social justice to deprived classes.”

On X, the SP termed Ambedkar a “messiah of the Pichhda (Backward Classes) , Dalit, Alpsankhyak (Minorities)” — the focus on these communities, dubbed the PDA strategy, is the SP’s attempt to broaden its voter base — and accused the “samanti sarkar (feudal government)” of insulting him.

SP spokesperson Ashutosh Verma also defended Abhishek Yadav and the Vahini. “A party worker is giving out a symbolic message that Akhilesh is leading the way in protecting the Constitution but the BJP, with its narrow mindset, is trying to divert the attention of people from core issues,” Verma said.

Sources within the SP said the party’s bid to claim the legacy of Ambedkar and honour him gained momentum after Akhilesh took over 2017, with its efforts to consolidate Dalit votes visibly increasing after it registered its best-ever Lok Sabha performance last year — it won 37 seats — seemingly riding on the “save the Constitution” and PDA planks.

Last December, the SP launched its “PDA charcha” initiative to highlight Ambedkar’s legacy while its leaders have been raising the issue of BJP “insulting the architect of the Constitution” regularly in their addresses.

SP and the Dalit vote

SP insiders pointed to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s “regard” for Ambedkar’s ideology, citing the SP’s support to BSP founder Kanshi Ram in the 1991 Etawah Lok Sabha polls. The win, they claim, laid the foundation for the SP-BSP alliance and the composition of a new constituency comprising the Dalits and the OBCs.

Ahead of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, for the first time since its inception, the SP formed a dedicated wing for Dalits — the Samajwadi Baba Saheb Ambedkar Vahini — with an aim to “take forward the ideologies of Ambedkar and socialist icon Ram Manohar Lohia”.

In 2023, Akhilesh claimed that the “samajwadi movement” launched by Mulayam Singh and Lohia and the path shown by Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram were the same and urged his party workers to walk this path.

Akhilesh unveiled an Ambedkar statue in Etawah on his birth anniversary on April 14 and referred to him as the greatest scholar, economist, social reformer and lawyer that the country had seen. The SP also ran a week-long “Ambedkar Jayanti Swabhiman Samman Samaroh” campaign to reach out to prominent Dalits across the state and felicitate them.

Chequered past

The SP and the BSP first joined hands in the 1993 Assembly elections. Though the BJP emerged as the single-largest party, winning 174 of the 425 seats, the SP-BSP combine that collectively won 176 seats went on to form the government headed by Mulayam with the support of the Congress (28), the Janata Dal (7), and smaller outfits.

Barely two years after forming the government, differences emerged between the SP and the BSP, following which Mayawati withdrew support in June 1995 and went on to take oath as the CM with the support of the BJP. However, her government lasted only for four months.

The SP and the BSP grew further apart and after the SP assumed power on its own in Uttar Pradesh in 2012, Akhilesh scrapped as many as 26 welfare schemes for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) initiated by Mayawati. His government also did away with reservation for SCs in government contracts.

The two parties came together again for the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls in 2018, winning both. Buoyed by their success, the SP and the BSP joined hands with then Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) to float the Mahagathbandhan for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. However, the SP and the BSP snapped ties following the alliance’s poor performance in the polls in which Akhilesh’s party won five seats and Mayawati’s party bagged 10 of the state’s 80 parliamentary constituencies.