Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati’s drastic move to crash land her political heir and nephew, Akash Anand, barely five months after launching him with much fanfare, has shocked her party's activists and supporters.
The fact that she has done so, right in the middle of the Lok Sabha polls is a huge embarrassment to the party and is disrupting the momentum of its election campaign. It has underlined both her vulnerability to pressures from the ruling party and central regime and also her personal megalomania that makes Behenji reluctant to delegate powers to even a chosen successor.
Significantly, the controversial decision came shortly after a fiery speech by Anand lambasting the BJP regime at a poll rally in Sitapur.
"This BJP government is a bulldozer government and a government of traitors. The party that leaves its youth hungry and enslaves its elderly is a terrorist government. Taliban runs such a government in Afghanistan," he declared in a rhetorical outburst. The young BSP leader along with four others, namely, BSP candidates Mahendra Yadav, Shyam Awasthi, and Akshay Kalra, and rally organiser Vikas Rajvanshi have been charged with violating the model code of electoral conduct.
Mayawati is reported to be furious with her nephew for his frontal assault on the ruling party. Senior BJP leaders are privately said to have warned her of dire consequences if the BSP did not start tempering such confrontational language against the government. The BSP supremo, when she was a political firebrand in her early years, used even stronger rhetoric against opponents and has, over the past many years, been careful not to openly antagonise the BJP juggernaut.
In fact, there have been persistent rumours that Behenji has a clandestine arrangement with the BJP to help the latter in both assembly and parliamentary polls without a formal alliance, despite all the token criticism of the government in speeches and tweets. She has also been accused by other Opposition parties of putting up candidates both in assembly and parliamentary polls to split the anti-BJP vote. In return, she is believed to have got relief from the authorities in corruption cases dating back over the past several decades.
Yet, there may well be other reasons apart from government pressures behind putting her nephew’s head on the chopping block at such a politically inopportune time. Right from the time when an ailing Kanshi Ram handed the reins of the BSP to Mayawati, she has doggedly refused to share power with any other party leader demanding not just loyalty but complete obeisance. While most parties nowadays are increasingly dominated by a supreme leader, in the case of BSP, Behenji is perched on a unique pedestal.
It was, therefore, interesting to note that five years ago, a week after the last Lok Sabha polls swept Narendra Modi and the BJP to a second term, Mayawati named her nephew, Akash Anand, as national coordinator of the BSP. A few years later, the BSP supremo publicly praised Anand while declaring that he was being groomed for a bigger role in the party. During the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections, the nephew was designated as the second star campaigner after Mayawati, somersaulting over her long-term legal adviser and confidante Satish Chandra Mishra.
So, when Mayawati announced Akash Anand as her chosen political successor some months ago it seemed to be part of a calculated plan to both frame a future chart for the BSP and even more so to fend off young Dalit challengers like Chandra Shekhar Azad in her bastion Uttar Pradesh. But interestingly, even while announcing her nephew as her heir, Behenji pointedly announced that she herself would continue to look after the party’s interests in Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring Uttarakhand while Anand would be taking care of other states in the country.
However, as the campaign for the 2024 parliamentary polls started gathering momentum, the young nephew reputed to be a good orator and enthusiastic Dalit activist appeared to have forgotten that he was on a short leash held by his overbearing aunt.
Having gained popularity, particularly among younger Dalits through his fierce poll speeches, Anand is reported to have increasingly projected himself as a firebrand determined to dislodge the BJP government. All of a sudden, the BSP which has been a listless waning force in Uttar Pradesh with the reputation of being the B team of the BJP started being talked about as a factor in the elections.
There is little doubt that the public humiliation of the up-and-coming BSP leader will be one more nail in the coffin of the once-promising political vehicle of Dalit power that is now reduced to a hollow shell of its former self. That Mayawati has removed her successor on the grounds that he wasn't "mature" enough after his onslaught against the party will further damage her reputation as an independent leader.
The resultant disenchantment among the already dwindling BSP base, mostly the Jatav Dalit sub-caste, could benefit both the BJP and the INDIA alliance as well as further aggravate the downward slide in voter turnout.
(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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