Mayawati eyes west UP, women vote

While some sources in the party say Chillupar was expelled for demanding three tickets for his family members in the upcoming elections, others say it is an open secret that Tiwari was in contact with the Samajwadi Party (SP).

While sources in the party said they are worried about the timing of the disciplinary action — just when the BSP needed all hands on the deck to counter a strong BJP and a resurgent SP — officially, the BSP maintains that the action is part of Mayawati’s no-compromise stand on indiscipline and that it won’t hurt the party.

BSP spokesperson M H Khan said, “Action against MLAs and other leaders was taken because of their indiscipline. Behan ji (Mayawati) does not tolerate anti-party activities. It was Mayawati ji who turned them into leaders of stature otherwise they have no personal strength and following. Hence, their expulsion or decision to quit the BSP is not going to affect our prospects in the upcoming elections.”

It all started in 2016 with the exit of Swami Prasad Maurya, considered the strongest leader in the party after Mayawati and a prominent OBC face. Maurya, who joined the BJP, is now a Cabinet minister in the Yogi Adityanath government.

Days after the 2017 poll rout, Mayawati had expelled Naseemuddin Siddiqui, the BSP’s Muslim face, on charges of anti-party activities. Siddiqui later joined the Congress.

Two sitting MLAs and prominent OBC leaders, Ram Achal Rajbhar and Lalji Verma, too, were expelled and are now with the SP. Their exit is a setback for the BSP in its bastion of Ambedkar Nagar — Rajbhar is MLA from Akbarpur while Verma represents Katehari.

Other key leaders who have left over the last couple of years include national general secretary Indrajeet Saroj, former state president K K Sachan, ex-MP Balihari Babu, former minister Tilak Chandra Ahirwar, former national general secretary Mahesh Arya, former state president Dayaram Pal, former minister Kamlakant Gautam, former general secretary Veer Singh, former state president R S Kushwaha and former MP Kadir Rana — most of them are now with the SP. Ambika Chaudhary, an influential leader from Ballia who was minister in the previous Akhilesh Yadav government but joined the BSP during the 2017 elections, too, returned to the SP fold a few weeks ago.

A senior BSP MLA, Sukhdev Rajbhar, passed away in October this year and another MLA, Ritesh Pandey of Jalalpur, was elected to the Lok Sabha from Ambedkar Nagar.

Then there’s Mukhtar Ansari, a five-term MLA. Though the gangster-turned-politician is still a BSP MLA, he is in Banda jail and has 38 cases of heinous crime lodged against him. As part of her decision to deny tickets to bahubali (musclemen) and mafia, Mayawati has announced that he won’t be fielded in the upcoming elections.

Besides these expulsions and suspensions, what has added to the uncertainty in the organisation is Mayawati’s decision to change party presidents of the state unit — four times in the past five years. In 2018, then state president Ram Achal Rajbhar was replaced with R S Kushwaha, who, in turn, was replaced with Munquad Ali in 2019. Again, a year later, Maaywati appointed Bhim Rajbhar as state chief.

A senior party senior leader said the changes were effected when the incumbents “started believing they had become leaders of tall stature” and began asking district-level workers to organise grand welcome ceremonies for them.

Party sources say the exits don’t matter because Mayawati is anyway the sole decision making authority.

Despite this seemingly endless churn in the party organisation, Mayawati seems to have a strategy in place for the elections.

While confident that she has the support of her core Jatav constituency, Mayawati is looking to expand her reach to upper castes, especially Brahmins, and Muslims.

National general secretary S C Mishra, the most prominent leader in the party after Mayawati and a key Brahmin face, has been holding Prabuddha Varg sammelans that are aimed especially at the Brahmin community. Starting from Rampur Maniharan seat in Saharanpur, Mishra plans to hold such sammelans in reserved constituencies over the next 20 days, with an eye of bringing Dalit and Brahmin voters together.

While the party has tried the Dalit-Brahmin formulation in the 2017 election — both communities together have a 36 per cent vote share — this time, Mayawati is reaching out to Jats and Muslims and deployed leaders from these communities in western UP, an attempt at stealing the SP-Rashtriya Lok Dal’s (RLD) thunder.

For now, Mayawati is focusing on the state’s 86 reserved constituencies (84 for SCs and two for STs), where she has a strong base and reckons that a bhaichara between castes may add to the BSP’s seats. Among the 84 SC seats, the BSP won only three in the 2017 Assembly polls and 15 in 2012.

Though Mayawati has been out of power in UP for over a decade, party insiders point to the vote share in successive elections to say that the BSP is still a force to reckon with. While the party’s vote share in the 2007 Assembly elections, when it won an absolute majority with 206 seats, was 30.43 per cent, it came down to 25.95 per cent in 2012 (80 seats). But even in the 2017 elections, when the party won 19 seats, its vote share stood at 22.23 per cent. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, which the party contested in alliance with the SP and RLD, the party won 10 seats with a vote share of 19.42 per cent.

In an election where the stakes are high for the BSP and its chief, Mayawati has launched another first — for a party that never releases pre-poll manifestos, she released a folder of the work done by earlier BSP governments and directed party workers to distribute these in every village and town across the state with a message that if the BSP returns to power in 2022, her government will work for development and public welfare.

She has also launched an outreach programme targeting women and the youth. While Mishra’s wife Kalpana is addressing ‘Prabudha Mahila Vichar Gosthi’ and ‘BSP mahila sammelan’ across the state on issues of ‘women security and honour’, his son has been holding ‘BSP Yuva Samvad’.