The swift rise and quick fall of BSP’s ‘west UP Muslim face’, Imran Masood

BSP leaders said an inkling had come of Masood facing the axe after he was not invited to a meeting of the party state unit on August 23 in Lucknow. BSP chief Mayawati had chaired the meeting.

Masood had ended his long association with the Congress ahead of the UP Assembly polls in January last year by joining the SP. Sources said he expected an Assembly ticket but was denied one. Months after the Assembly results, Masood moved from the SP to the BSP.

Mayawati welcomed Masood with open arms, immediately appointing him BSP convener for western UP region and assigning him the additional responsibility of Muslim outreach in Uttarakhand districts, including Dehradun, Haridwar, Udham Singh Nagar and Nainital.

Sources talk about how, when Masood attended his first BSP meeting at the party office in Lucknow, Mayawati asked him to move from the back row to the front. She introduced him to party leaders saying Masood would work with the Muslim community for the BSP.

Sources said Mayawati also sent a message down the ranks, to mandal (divisional) coordinators of western UP, to ensure adequate arrangements at meetings addressed by Masood, and said he should speak at the end and get the maximum time.

The expulsion letter issued by the BSP indicated the disillusionment of the party towards Masood, with the expulsion letter to him signed by its Saharanpur district president Janeshwar Prasad. It said Masood had been given “several warnings” for his “indiscipline and anti-party activities” but had not mended his ways.

The letter accused him of mounting pressure for a mayor ticket for a family member in the UP urban local body elections, and said the BSP conceded, on the condition that if his candidate lost, Masood would not be given a Lok Sabha ticket. The letter added that the BSP had promised Masood the Lok Sabha ticket from Saharanpur conditional to his activities and working style.

Masood’s sister-in-law Khadija Masood eventually lost the urban polls to a BJP candidate by 8,000 votes.

BSP leader Prasad told The Indian Express that the party had also conceded Masood’s demand for rosters to enrol new members for the party. “After the end of the deadline, when he was asked to submit the registers, he returned most of them without having made (any new) members. He has still not returned many registers,” Prasad said.

He questioned Masood’s statements to the media praising Congress leaders and the I.N.D.I.A bloc, and admitted the BSP leadership was upset with him.

A nephew of former Congress MP Rasheed Masood, Masood contested and won his first election in 2007 as an Independent candidate from the Muzaffarabad Assembly constituency (known as Behat since delimitation in 2008).

Over the years, he grew out of the shadow of his uncle, and in 2012, was picked by the Congress as one of the youth faces of Rahul’s team. The same year, he contested polls from the Nakur Assembly seat in Saharanpur, and lost narrowly to the BSP’s Dharam Singh Saini.

Just before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, a video clip surfaced in which Masood was purportedly seen threatening Narendra Modi, then the PM candidate of the BJP, as he blamed the BJP and RSS for the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. A case was registered against him over hate speech.

In the Lok Sabha polls that followed, Masood lost to BJP candidate Raghav Lakhan Pal. Masood’s ill luck continued in the 2017 Assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when he lost to the BJP and BSP, respectively.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Masood rejected the allegations against him of anti-party activities, saying the party’s anger stemmed from his praise for the Gandhis and call for the BSP to join the I.N.D.I.A bloc.

Masood also said he had strengthened the BSP in western UP, but there several people around Mayawati who were working to weaken the party. “A party which come to power in UP in 2007 on its own strength, got confined to a single seat in 2022. If we do not show concern for this downfall, it will be cheating the party and the movement… In the present scenario, if the BSP contests the Lok Sabha elections alone, it may get zero seats,” Masood said.