As Mayawati see-saws over her successor, a look back at her own smooth rise

While Kanshi Ram, who kept his family away from the BSP, didn’t waver once he had made his choice, Akash’s fate has been swinging like a pendulum. For the second time on Monday, within the space of 15 months, Mayawati rejected the 30-year-old – who is the son of her brother – as her political heir, after declaring him to be so.

In her statement Monday, Mayawati said she was expelling Akash “in the interest of the self-respect and self-esteem movement of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar and following the tradition of discipline of the venerable Shri Kanshi Ram ji”.

Mayawati’s own journey to the top of the BSP, however, followed Kanshi Ram handpicking and then mentoring her. Born to a Telecom Department employee of the Delhi government in village Badalpur close to Dadri on the Capital’s suburbs, Maywati was exposed to Dalit literature at an early age and initially aspired to become an IAS officer.

In 1977, she took up a job as a schoolteacher, hoping to prepare for the UPSC Civil Services exam on the side.

Those plans came to a halt after Mayawati caught attention as a firebrand Dalit speaker. In her book Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution, political scientist Sudha Pai writes that at a ‘Jat Pat Todo (Break the Caste Mould) meeting of the Janata Party in 1977, a time when the coalition was at its peak, an indomitable Mayawati vehemently attacked the use of the term Harijan for Scheduled Castes, which was deemed patronising by Dalit activists.

Harijan was a term given by Mahatma Gandhi to Dalits during the freedom struggle, and had also been questioned by Ambedkar.

Kanshi Ram, who founded the BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities’ Employees’ Federation) in 1978, spotted Mayawati at a meeting of his organisation. He told her – forget the civil services, join politics, and one day, IAS officers will be at your beck and call.

Mayawati heeded the call and took the plunge into full-time activism, vowing to never marry and to dedicate her life to serving Dalits – much like Kanshi Ram had done earlier, renouncing his family in Punjab when he decided to mobilise the community.

With Kanshi Ram taking Mayawati under his wings, she hit the expressway to progress, continuing the run in the BSP, which was formed by Kanshi Ram in 1984.

Like Mayawati now, Kanshi Ram exercised full control over the party, reflected in the slogan ‘BSP is Kanshi Ram; Kanshi Ram is BSP’. Pai writes in her book, which covered the 1990s extensively, “Kanshi Ram, who is the president, heads it (the BSP). Apart from him, there are no other leaders who hold any high post in the party. The rest are all workers of the party. The sole exception is Mayawati, who is the secretary of the party. She, in recent years, has emerged as a leader in her own right.”

Pai also talks about the split in the BAMCEF at its Nagpur session in 1986, and says insiders attributed it to personality clashes between Kanshi Ram and others owing to the rise of Mayawati to “a position of authority”.

In December 2001 at Lucknow, an already ailing Kanshi Ram declared Mayawati as his successor, expressing hope that she would lead the movement to bring about a “manavtawadi (humanistic)” society, to replace what he saw as the extant “Manuwadi” society.

In 2003, Mayawati became BSP president for the first time, at the age of 47. Shortly after, in May 2004, Kanshi Ram’s mother and brothers filed a petition in the Delhi High Court claiming Mayawati was denying them access to him and that he was “being kept as a virtual prisoner”.

In their petition, the three said they had come to Delhi 10 times in the past eight months, but were unable to have free access to Kanshi Ram, who was receiving treatment at a hospital.

The BSP denied the claim as “totally false and baseless”, and said “it is unfortunate that family members of Kanshi Ram are playing into the hands of some vested interests”.

Kanshi Ram, who never recovered from his illness, passed away in 2006.

Mayawati faced little opposition from within the party and emerged as the undisputed leader of Dalits, especially her Jatav community, even as she reached out to other castes, under a new slogan of ‘Sarvajan Samaj’.

In 2007, in what would mark the peak of Mayawati’s political career, she led the BSP to power in Uttar Pradesh winning a majority on its own for the first time — with her tactic of wooing other castes, especially the Brahmins, paying off.

Akash Anand isn’t the first to face Mayawati’s dictatorial wrath through the ups, and especially the downs, of the BSP. However, those who have watched the BSP closely point to its one-supreme-leader nature since the time of Kanshi Ram, with little scope for internal debate. It was how Mayawati herself was chosen, after all.