UP: BACK TO BASICS FOR BSP
A rattled Mayawati reworks the BSP’s battleplan for the 2022 assembly election
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is in coursecorrection mode after its debacle in the Lok Sabha election. Party supremo Mayawati has asked all district presidents to come up with reasons for the BSP’s drubbing. Contesting 38 of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, as part of an alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), the BSP won 10 seats. The party’s vote share of 19.3 per cent was a notch below the 19.6 per cent votes it polled in the 2014 parliamentary election, where it drew a blank.
At the first post-poll review in New Delhi on June 3, Mayawati hinted at breaking the pre-poll alliance. “The SP failed to transfer votes to the BSP. Yadavs, who are considered the core base of the SP, voted for the BJP in a majority of the seats that the BSP contested,” she said. Mayawati also announced that the BSP, in a first, would contest byelections to the 11 assembly seats that have fallen vacant after the Lok Sabha poll. “At the review meet, BSP leaders were of the opinion that the party had weakened in the Lok Sabha seats it did not contest, with senior leaders joining the Congress or the BJP,” says a zonal coordinator of the BSP.
Three of the BSP’s 10 MPs are Muslims. A key aspect of the party’s revival strategy is to present itself as a more bankable option to Muslims than the SP. Hit hard by the decision to expel Nasimuddin Siddiqui in 2017, the BSP is building a new line of Muslim leadership, starting with the appointment of Amroha
MP Danish Ali as its chief whip in the Lok Sabha. Ali has a following among Muslims in western UP. Munquad Ali, the BSP’s in-charge in Aligarh, has been made incharge for the Lucknow, Bareilly, Kanpur, Jhansi and Chitrakoot divisions as well. “Muslims have shown faith in the BSP in the Lok Sabha election. The party aims to hold on to their support in the forthcoming elections,” he says.
After nearly 15 years, the BSP has chosen a Dalit MP, Girish Chandra, as its floor leader in the Lok Sabha. Jaunpur MP Shyam Singh Yadav has been appointed deputy leader in the lower house. “Mayawati is trying to project that Yadavs are not as solidly behind the SP as Dalits are behind the BSP,” says Ajit Kumar, professor in the sociology department at Banaras Hindu University. “By striking a Dalit-Yadav equation, she is checking if the BSP can draw Yadav votes outside an alliance with the SP.”
A grave setback for the BSP has been the exit of backward caste leaders groomed by party founder Kanshi Ram. “The Lok Sabha results have shown that the BSP is losing base among non-Jatav Dalits and the most backward castes,” says Rakesh Singh, a former BSP coordinator for eastern UP. Mayawati has opened doors for such former leaders who may be willing to rejoin. She also wants the booth-level ‘Bhaichara’ committees revived within two months. Earlier, these committees would be activated only before polls. Though assembly elections in UP are due only in 2022, Mayawati realises that time’s running out.