Yesterday, three days before Kumari Mayawati completes a year as Uttar Pradesh chief minister, a Union minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet quit the Congress and joined the Bahujan Samaj Party. So did some other Congress leaders and more are said to be on their way. This comes after a massive campaign in Uttar Pradesh by Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi.
A year is a very long time in politics. After Mayawati was sworn in on 13 may, heading the first stable, non-coalition government in UP in 17 years, the BSP-Congress bonhomie had made the latter look like the BSP’s B-team. “The turning point was the Gujarat election,” says JNU political scientist Sudha Pai, author of a book on the BSP. The BSP didn’t win a single seat but cost the Congress more than a dozen seats by eating into its vote bank. Around the same time it won only a single seat in Himachal Pradesh but increased its voteshare from 0.7 to 7 percent. In the Delhi municipal elections last year it won 10 percent votes and 15 seats. And then in the last week of December Mayawati went on a whirlwind tour of the country- Chandigarh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Bihar – often promising thir or that to particular caste groups, poaching local politicians from other parties and urging voters to accept its ‘Sarvajan Samaj’ formula.
A senior Congress leader in Lucknow says that the Congress strategy since then has been to force Mayawati to battle it out on home turf. Hence the Rahul Gandhi offensive on Mayawati not doing enough for Dalits. “Even if it does not impress voters in UP for the moment it does send out the right signal to Congress’ dalit base in other states like Haryana and MP,” the leader explains.
Mayawati’s critics were delighted when the BSP lost the Ballia (in eastern UP) assembly bypoll in January. “Around 20% dalit voters didn’t vote at all,” says Saharanpur-based Dalit activist Ram Kumar, “the Brahmin candidate who represented the BSP there was a particularly unpopular one.” It seemed that the BSP’s ‘Sarvajan Samaj’ alliance was hurting its heels.
“But she has Jat leader Mahendra Singh Tikait to thank,” adds Kumar. In March the Bhartiya Kisan Union leader hurled unmentionable caste slurs at Mayawati at a rally in Bijnore. Mayawati had him arrested but as a compromise had him released on bail. “By not taking Tikait’s insult lying down she sent a message to Dalit masses who their leader was,” says Pai. And at the same time she made sure she didn’t take so drastic an action against him that it would hurt her efforts to woo the Thakurs.
Three state assembly and and two Lok Sabha bypolls in April were won with handsome margins in April. The Congress and BJP candidates lost their security deposits in four of these seats. Political analysts say because of the consolidation of dalit votes because of the Tikait incident. “But it could also be because the crucial Brahmin votes that make it a tipping point for victory are more easily had in western UP,” says Vishwanath pandey, registrar with the Benares Hindu University. Pandey, a keen political observer, explains that the newfound Brahmin love of the party has been restricted to the Kanyakubja Brahmins, which is the sub-caste of the party’s Brahmin mascot Satish Chandra Mishra. “Eastern UP is dominated by Saryupari Brahmins who are still close to the BJP,” he explains, adding, “most of the posts in the government have been cornered by the Kanyakubjas.”
The BSP’s social engineering with Brahmins may be copied by Mulayam Singh yadav and Lalu Yadav, but as far as the BSP is considered it is a big ploy, says psephologist Yogendra Yadav of CSDS. Indeed, CSDS survey show that only 17% of Brahmins in UP voted for the BSP in the assembly polls last year and that Brahmins are still largely with the BJP. However, the impression of a Dalit-Brahmin alliance helps the BSP give an impression of an all-inclusive Dalit party that attracts all castes, particularly the lower OBCs who are the party’s second biggest voteblock after Dalits.
Ram Kumar, who runs an NGO that works on cases of atrocities against dalits across UP, says that while Brahmins have gained a lot from this government, violence against Dalits has increased. “Mayawati’s orders to the police brass to not register cases under the SC/ST Atrocities Act has sent out a signal in the rural areas that you can do anything to a dalit and get away with it,” he says. The relaxation of the Atrocities Act, which Mayawati officially denies but is there to see on the ground, has always happened in Mayawati’s regimes because an increase in the number of FIRs later shows up badly in the crime records. Her opponents wave the reports in the state assembly, point out how Dalits are suffering under the Dalit CM’s nose. “Also that the harshness of the Atrocities Act creates animosity against the BSP amongst the rest,” explains a BSP worker in Lucknow. He says that it deflects the party from marching forward. “The most important task at hand is to make Behenji the PM,” he says, “and the Dalits understand this.”
This time the BSP has been careful enough not to openly indulge in making money out of mass administrative transfers, but its agenda to build statues of Dalit icons and publish literature about them remains unabated. “This is a state where farmers are dying! And she wastes public money in putting up her own statues!” says former Lucknow University vice-chancellor Roop Rekha Verma. “The statue politics is part of the BSP’s mobilization strategies over the last two decades. You may see it as wasteful expenditure but for Mayawati it is investment,” says Badri Narayan, author of a book on the BSP’s use of mythology and history to win Dalit votes.
Mayawati rarely visits the secretariat in Lucknow, signing files at home. While Shashank Shekhar Singh and his team of bureaucrats run the administration, Mayawati likes to devote the better part of her time to building the party. When in October last year there was uncertainty over mid-term general elections, she had party workers from Jammu to Tamil Nadu visit Lucknow for a massive rally. The BSP is widely expected to do well in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh assembly elections.
The BSP typically contests all seats in every election even if it knows it is going to forfeit its deposit in most places. It is said about the BSP that it contests the first election to lose, the seond one to defeat and the third one to win. Considering 2009 is the first time the BSP will be seriously pitching itself as a national party for the Lok Sabha, why is there so much talk about Mayawati as the next Prime Minister? “There definitely is a sense of panic,” says Pai, “it is too early to make such predictions. And who can predict Indian politics either way?”
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