Mayawati banks on her party’s core voter base, seeks to play spoilsport in U.P.
Bucking the perception of being the ‘B’ team of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party is set to spoil the prospects of the BJP in the first two rounds of voting for Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.
Ahead of the BSP’s first bigticket rally, to be addressed by national coordinator Akash Anand, in western U.P.’s Nagina constituency on Saturday, the caste equation of the party’s candidates for the 16 seats that go to polls on April 19 and 26 reveals that party supremo Mayawati aims to dent the vote banks of both the ruling NDA and the Opposition INDIA bloc in the region where both the Samajwadi Party and the BSP are struggling against the combined strength of the BJP and the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
However, political observers say that the BSP’s strategy is to build on its core vote bank of Jatavs by using discontentment among specific communities to its advantage, while hoping that Muslims will show faith in Ms. Mayawati’s nonpartisan stand.
Caste calculus
Tapping on the Thakur and Tyagi discontent against the BJP, the BSP has fielded Rajput candidates in Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddh Nagar, and a Tyagi from Meerut. In Muzaffarnagar, the BSP chief has played the most backward caste (MBC) card by positioning a Prajapati candidate against the might of BJP’s Sanjeev Balyan. MBCs have been the electoral muscle of the BJP in the last two elections, but have been squirming because of a lack of representation from the Jat belt. In Bijnor, which Ms. Mayawati herself represented in 1989, she has fielded an influential Jat candidate to take on RLD’s Gurjar pick , and in Baghpat, she has picked a Gurjar to take on the Jat choice of the RLD.
The biggest surprise came in Aligarh where, after initially giving the ticket to the former district president of AIMIM, who would have dented the prospects of the Jat SPCongress candidate, she brought in a
Brahmin turncoat of the BJP to take on Satish Gautam, the twotime BJP MP who is facing the ire of the Kalyan Singh family. Similarly in Mathura, after boxer Vijender Singh moved from the Congress to the BJP, the BSP quickly changed its candidate and brought in a disgruntled BJP Jat leader to take on BJP’s Hema Malini.
Spoiling the BJP’s game
It is a rare election where both SP and BSP have not fielded a Muslim candidate in Aligarh, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, and Baghpat. The SP believes that Muslims are with it anyway, but the fact that the BSP has not used the Muslim card shows that it is targeting the BJP vote on these seats.
“Hum ko BJP aur SP dono ka khel bigadna hain.
Tabhi hamara game banega (We have to spoil the game of the BJP and the SP to secure our prospects),” said Suraj Singh, the BSP leader in charge of the Aligarh and Kanpur divisions. “By polarising the election, the BJP picks the SP as its easy rival. It feels threatened by the BSP because it has a dedicated cadre and vote. So it uses a section of the media to project that the BSP is against the interest of Muslims. We are working on the ground to change that perception and in seats like Aligarh, we don’t feel we need a Muslim candidate to get their votes,” he said.
The BSP has fielded Muslim candidates from Kairana, Rampur, Pilibhit, Moradabad, Saharanpur, and Amroha. In all these seats, except Pilibhit, the
Muslim population is more than 45%.
“In most of these seats, the SPCongress alliance is strong. Even in the next phases, we will target both the SP and BJP depending on who is the main contender,” said Mr. Singh. For instance, in Mainpuri, the BSP has fielded a nonYadav OBC Shakya face to take on Dimple Yadav and a Sikh candidate from Kheri to channelise farmers’ anger.
Neutral stance
Claiming that the BSP is the only alternative to the Hindutva politics of the BJP, Meerutbased Dalit thinker Sushil Gautam said that centuries of suffering will not allow any drift among Behenji’s core vote bank.
Muslims, he added, had been wary of Ms. Mayawati since she had canvassed for the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2002 after the Godhra incident. “However, the choice of candidates shows she has maintained her neutral stance and is applying her social engineering to western U.P. this time. Woh palti nahin hain (She hasn’t backpedalled). Muslims know that the SP and the Congress do not have any vote base in western U.P. The confusion in SP’s ticket distribution has also helped the party,” he said.
A veteran party worker however admitted that it was a losing battle.
“Earlier, parties used to decide their candidates after going through the BSP’s list. This time, it is the other way around. We are responding to BJP’s choices,” he rued.