Can Maya resurrect the BSP, which is no longer the first choice of Dalits?

The Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) national president Mayawati is desperate to resurrect the party in Uttar Pradesh, a state where she once held sway, besides maintaining the status of a national party albeit with minimal representation in the state assemblies: seven MLAs in five states.

Her supporters are exasperated by the political ambivalence and non-performance of the BSP, the only party founded by a Dalit for Dalits with the promise of social and political empowerment and a dream to give a Dalit Prime Minister to the nation.
In the first decade since its birth in 1984, the BSP struggled, but with an ascending vote percentage between one and nine, changed its strategy of going solo and picking up suitable crutches. It ruled Uttar Pradesh thrice in a coalition of different parties intermittently from 1995 to 2003 and independently from 2007-2012.
Since then, it has been on a losing spree.
Now, fearing further attrition from her party’s vote bank, Mayawati has once again changed her strategy of finding poll partners in poll-bound states and has decided to go solo. Is it another experiment or a course correction?
The question is can Mayawati revive the moribund party? Political expert Prof Badri Narayan’s cryptic reply is, “It’s the need of the time but difficult as the sub-classification politics may weaken it further.”
Actually, Dalits who form 21% of the state’s population are no longer a cohesive bloc with non-BSP parties luring away sub-groups.
Thus, the revival of the party could prove to be a gigantic task for several reasons. The BSP is no longer the only choice for Mayawati’s core voters — Dalits, including Jatavs. There has also been a generational shift and the BSP has no discernible plans to attract young voters. The party, which grew on their anti-upper caste slogans today carries the stigma of “BJP’s B Party”. Though the BJP has widened its outreach, it is still seen as a Bania-Brahmin-Rajput party. Lastly, over the years, BSP has become a seasonal party which is active only during elections.
With the result of the elections, all its experiments of stitching political alliances or going solo have miserably failed. There has been an exodus of committed leaders and cadres as the party courted new candidates for want of funds or sometimes to fix the caste calculus. These leaders were attracted by BSP’s committed vote bank and not its ideology.
Since 2012, the BSP has lost all six elections, including three Vidhan Sabha and Lok Sabha elections each in Uttar Pradesh, where Mayawati became chief minister four times to socially and economically empower the Dalits. She was a firebrand leader who even kept national parties and their stalwarts on tenterhooks.
But after 2014, the BSP, which gave voice to Dalits, lost its own voice.
After her complete rout in UP and Haryana, Mayawati is now desperate to reactivate the party to stem the exodus of her frustrated voters who, in 2024, amply displayed their willingness to move to other parties.
She has taken two major steps.
First, she announced her decision to contest the upcoming elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand, as well as bypolls to nine seats in UP independently. The question remains if she would play the role of a spoilsport to bail out the BJP or finally contest elections to win some seats. This one would know only after the candidates are announced.
Of late, she has been stitching alliances with regional forces in states like Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
Second, she reinstated her nephew Akash Anand, whom she had ruthlessly withdrawn from campaigning in the middle of the crucial Lok Sabha elections in UP.
Mayawati has belatedly realised that the poll partners did not or could not transfer their votes to the BSP candidates, while her votes were transferred to poll partners.
This is also a misconception as her voters did not support Yadav candidates of the Samajwadi Party in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections despite an electoral tie-up in which both SP founder the late Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati had shared the dais, over two decades after the collapse of their alliance in 1995. This was partly because of the ground-level social equations in which Yadav-Dalits do not gel well and partly because of her purported message to her cadre not to support the poll partner.
Mayawati’s political trajectory also raises questions about her credibility. After the shift of Dalit votes from BSP to the opposition INDIA bloc in the 2024 elections, she rightly fears her party may not remain in demand in a situation in which major pre-poll combinations contest polls and form the government.
Much water has flowed down the Ganga since the state or even the Centre witnessed a phase of coalition governments. Since 2007 and 2004, the voters have been electing majority governments in UP and pre-poll formations like UPA and NDA at the Centre respectively leaving no room for bargaining or manipulations.
Now, after successive flop shows in UP as well as in other states, Mayawati’s decision to go solo in Maharashtra and Jharkhand and the by-polls to UP’s nine assembly seats may go awry.
With BR Ambedkar’s family active in Maharashtra politics, the BSP has never been a party in demand for Dalits of the state. And now in a crowded electoral space with two heavy coalitions fighting for the crown, the BSP is unlikely to repeat its 2004 performance when the party had polled its highest vote percentage of about four percent, which dipped to 2.33 percent in 2009, 2.38 in 2014 and 0.92 percent in 2014.
Unlike its UP competitor, the Samajwadi Party which has picked up a few seats in Maharashtra, Mayawati has never opened its account though her party has been contesting elections since 1992 when it had polled 0.42 per cent votes.
Kanshi Ram started his politics in Maharashtra but failed to construct a vote base like in the northern states – UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.
In Jharkhand, the BSP polled 2.44 per cent votes in 2009. It picked up one seat in 2014, polling 1.8 per cent votes but failed to retain it in 2019 though its vote percentage increased to 2.5 per cent.
Interestingly, in UP also, of the nine seats for which by-polls will be held, the SP won 4, the BJP 3 and its allies Nishad Party and RLD one each in the 2022 assembly polls. However, the BSP, which avoided contesting the by-elections so far, is determined to enter the field in a bid to retrieve much of its lost ground, though some observers are of the view that it will play spoilsport, bailing out the BJP.
Rajesh Paswan, a Dalit activist based in Meerut, is confident about BSP’s turnaround provided the leadership takes some major corrective steps.
“The BSP must return to Kanshi Ram’s mission in which their social movement used to take precedence over political movement, they have to reunite people working for the community. After all, BAMSEF is to BSP, what RSS is to BJP. Neither BSP nor BJP can survive or grow without the support of BAMSEF and BJP. Dalits will support a strong leader committed to their cause and BSP still holds that charm. There is no need for Mayawati to fear which party or caste will get annoyed by her politics and decisions. She must again fight her battle for social justice in every street and mohalla and on every platform including social media. There is a generational shift since Kanshi Ram days.”
According to Paswan, the party’s revival will come from its social acceptance —and BSP still has the potential.
However, not many may agree with Paswan as Mayawati lacks the fire with which she had started the mission in the late 1980s and so far, she has not given free hand to Akash Anand as Kanshi Ram had given her.
Now, it’s a do-or-die battle for Mayawati as her dedicated voters are impatient and may move on. And once they move on, the BSP will also lose its appeal. It may have to remain to contend with the national party status with no power.
A political observer, S K Srivastava, said, “The BSP’s experiment to form alliances with regional parties in various states failed to get desired results. Be it the Lok Sabha election or the assembly election after the fiasco in the election, the BSP chief Mayawati walked out of the alliance.”
Sunita Aron is a consulting editor with the HT based in Lucknow. You can find her on X as @overto. The weekly column, Keeping up with UP tackles everything from politics to social and cultural mores in the country’s most populous state. The views expressed are personal.