Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati’s decision, just a few months before next year’s Lok Sabha polls, to name her 28-year-old nephew Akash Anand as her political heir appears to be a desperate bid to give a young look to her jaded and fast fading party.
It is primarily aimed at stopping the alarming exodus of the BSP cadre to other parties of younger Dalit supporters including those among her own Jatav sub-caste that had, till recently, remained loyal despite her waning electoral fortunes. By anointing the London-educated MBA degree holder as her successor, she is also hoping to give a modern visage to a political outfit that appears to be increasingly falling behind the times.
This is not to suggest that Behenji has any intention of retiring from active politics. Significantly, she has made it clear that Uttar Pradesh (UP), the country’s most populous state and the BSP’s main political arena, will remain her domain along with neighbouring Uttarakhand while her nephew will look after the party’s interests elsewhere in the country.
There is little doubt that Mayawati will remain as domineering within the party as ever, and the young BSP leader will be on a short leash held by his aunt.
No Alternative but to Turn to Her Own Family
Behenji, who like her mentor Kanshi Ram, had steered clear of dynastic politics for most of her turbulent political career first showed indications of shifting from her earlier approach nearly five years back shortly after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. In a surprise decision, she appointed her younger brother Anand Kumar as BSP vice-president and his son Akash as the national coordinator. Although Anand was known as her favourite within her entire family, she had earlier discouraged him from bagging either a party post or a position in the government when she was in power.
It is, therefore, not a total surprise that Mayawati has looked to her nephew Akash as the future of the BSP which has for several years ceased to be the unique socio-political movement that Kanshi Ram had created, and increasingly become a leader-centric party like others.
While Behenji's personal ambition bordering on megalomania was well known even during her heyday, she had earlier tried to strike a balance between dedicated party coordinators on the ground and key bureaucratic and political advisers.
With this support machine having virtually collapsed under the weight of her steady and almost irreversible political decline, Mayawati in many ways has perhaps little other option but to turn to her own family to survive in the rough and tumble of Indian politics.
Grim Situation for the BSP Across the Country
Unfortunately for the BSP supremo and her young political heir, these are not easy times for a party that had once promised a new era in Indian politics. Repeated electoral defeats, many of them complete routs, have become routine for the BSP across the country. Last year, the party was dealt a devastating blow in its bastion when it was reduced to just a single seat in the 403-member state assembly, its worst-ever performance, in the state elections.
The situation gets grimmer by the day for the BSP in other parts of the country as well.
The recent round of assembly polls in four states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana tells the sad story of the party being reduced from a weak to an even weaker position despite Mayawati, her brother Anand Kumar, and nephew Akash campaigning vigorously in all of them.
In Rajasthan, where Mayawati held as many as eight rallies, the number of seats for the BSP came down from six in the last elections to just two this time and its vote percentage fell from over 4 percent to a mere 1.8 percent. In Madhya Pradesh, where Behenji addressed nine election meetings, her party drew a blank although it had won two last time with the BSP faring the same in Chhattisgarh where its vote share was halved.
Ironically, in Telangana where the BSP even had a chief ministerial candidate, a former IPS officer, it could win barely one percent of the vote.
Even Her Sizeable Muslim Support in UP Has Dwindled
Reinventing the BSP by promoting a young, foreign-educated nephew is unlikely to revive the flagging appeal of the party which seems to lack its earlier ideological daring and organisational dynamism that shook up the politics of UP in particular and the country in general, only one and a half decades ago. Few Dalits believe any longer that Behenji is the leader who can radically change their lives from centuries of oppression.
To make matters worse for the BSP supremo, the sizeable Muslim support she had at one point buttressed particularly in UP has dwindled, with most members of the minority community convinced that she had become a captive of the ruling Modi regime which was using her party to split the minority and Dalit vote to benefit the BJP in elections.
She has recently lost two popular young Muslim leaders in Uttar Pradesh, Imran Masood and Danish Ali, expelling the first and suspending the second, both for anti-party activities. Masood has already joined the Congress, the party he originally belonged to and Ali is likely to follow in his footsteps.
With the rapidly dwindling support from its core Dalit base and an increasingly hostile Muslim minority, it would take a political miracle for the BSP to extricate itself from its current impasse. While for Behenji it looks like the inglorious end of a once illustrious career, her heir and nephew faces the dismal prospect of falling down even before he can take wing.
(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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