The Mayawati enigma deepens

Why would a heavyweight politician in today’s world of shifting tactical alliances, decide to go solo? Speculations abound but no one can quite say for sure.

Conventional wisdom and logic dictate that a potentially winning combination has no reason to be disturbed. But Dalit icon, former four-time UP chief minister and BSP’s presiding deity, Mayawati, is hardly deterred by such dialectics.

BSP chief Mayawati

Just as the election battle heats up in India’s political heartland Uttar Pradesh - even as the BJP juggernaut hauled by Modi and Yogi Adityanath threaten to ride roughshod over all that comes their way; even as Akhilesh Yadav picks up the pieces in his backyard and the Gandhis look determined to leave their family pocket boroughs - Mayawati has thrown the sucker punch.

She announced this week her momentous decision of contesting this most crucial 2024 Lok Sabha election on her own. ``My decision to go alone in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls is ‘atal (unwavering)’ and no one should have any confusion on the issue,” the four-time former Uttar Pradesh chief minister posted on X.

She also criticised the “opponents” and said, “Our opponents look quite flustered with the fact that the BSP is contesting the elections on its strength and quite ably at that in Uttar Pradesh. That is why they seem to float fresh rumours each day to mislead the masses,” she added, for good measure.

Her decision is mystifying, to say the least. Going by history, the BSP and SP combination could have given a tougher fight to the BJP, an alliance certainly stronger than the one stitched by SP and the non-existent Congress, which will be weakened further if the Gandhi family decide to leave their favourite constituencies for the first time since 1951.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha, BSP won ten Lok Sabha seats—up from zero in 2014—in UP while its ally, SP bagged five seats. The Mahagathbandhan - SP+ BSP + Rashtriya Lok Dal - pulled 39.23 percent votes in UP, with Mayawati alone bagging a healthy 19.43 percent.

In the run up to the 2019 general election, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati was so determined to field good candidates that she had reportedly reached out to former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) leader, HD Deve Gowda, to suggest some names to which the latter obliged. Gowda’s trusted aide, JD(S) general secretary Kunwar Danish Ali, fought on a BSP ticket and won the Lok Sabha seat from Amroha.

Former UP BJP minister, Siddhartha Nath Singh, told this reporter: ``Mayawati is playing a long game. Plus, her experience with Akhilesh Yadav has not been good.’’

Insiders in the BSP camp – who talk only off the record - say that their supreme leader’s move is dictated by a combination of personal and political motivations. Ever since the idea of INDIA was floated by the anti-BJP opposition, Mayawati began withdrawing from a combination that would place the BSP as a junior partner in an alliance dictated by Akhilesh Yadav, with the Congress and Rahul Gandhi as senior partners.

``Behenji (Mayawati) would have been okay with a bilateral alliance with the SP, as last time. But she was not ready to play second fiddle even to Akhilesh, as she won 10 Lok Sabha seats to SP’s five in 2019. On Akhilesh’s part, despite a potent Backward caste-Dalit combination, it is easier to deal with the Congress, which has been a spent force in the state since the last three decades or a little more,” said an office bearer in Lucknow.

As things stand now, the Congress is contesting 17 Lok Sabha seats in UP, as per the terms of agreement with the SP as part of the INDIA alliance. It is anyone’s guess as to how many they would win out of those 17. In the 2022 UP assembly elections – even assuming there can be no comparisons with Lok Sabha polls – the Congress won 2 seats out of an assembly strength of 403, finishing behind the likes of Apna Dal, Rashtriya Lok Dal, Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal and Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party! Interestingly, the only party it managed to beat was the BSP, which got one seat less, but who grabbed the third highest vote share with 12.9 percent.

``It is impossible to explain Mayawati’s lack of ambition. Why would you not want to continue with a potentially winning combination? Leaders are re-inventing themselves today, like Chandrababu Naidu. But she has a nearly 19-20 percent vote share, which if diverted, would easily help the BJP, On the face of it though, she does not have any alliance,’’ says Rasheed Kidwai, journalist, author, and political analyst.

Mayawati first served as UP chief minister between June and October 1995 with the help of the BJP. She did another term as CM between May 2002 to August 2003, which was also backed by the BJP. She campaigned in Gujarat for Modi during the high voltage 2002 elections, which catapulted the then Gujarat chief minister into superstardom.

Could the cause of the current reluctance be Mayawati’s nephew, Akash Anand? The BSP leader, who is pretty much a recluse in this time and age of social media, had named Akash as her successor and party chief last December, though an official declaration is yet to be made. In 2019, she had appointed her brother Anand Kumar as the party’s national vice president, leaving no one in doubt that like many regional parties, the BSP too was going to be a family affair.

That has led to other problems. In 2016, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had detected cash deposits totalling over ₹104 crore in an account belonging to the BSP and ₹1.43 crore in another account belonging to Anand Kumar. Then again in 2019, the Income Tax department has attached "benami" assets worth ₹230 crore of retired IAS officer, Net Ram, who had served as Mayawati’s secretary and was her key aide. So, there is no doubt that like many other political heavyweights in the country, the BSP leader too has investigative agencies on her tail.

Party leaders say apart from the probes, her ambition to promote nephew Akash is paramount, which is going to happen soon after the general elections. They state that she wants to hand over her 20 percent vote share in UP intact to Akash, realizing that her personal appeal now lies diluted. ``But could it be enough for her to adopt this hands-off posture? Mamata Banerjee is not giving her nephew a free ride,” says Kidwai, adding that it is a fact that some politicians could be uneasy about public litigations and tend to go into a shell.

In addition, the BSP chief is also wary of losing her legislators to other parties, as has been the case during the course of her political career.

The SP-BSP alliance has a formidable history in UP. In the early 1990s, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram formed a coalition government in the state with Mulayam as the state's chief minister. The alliance won the 1993 assembly elections against BJP in wake of the Ram Janambhoomi movement, with a catchy slogan Mile Mulayam, Kanshi Ram, Hava mein ud gaye Jai Shri Ram ( "Mulayam and Kanshiram Come Together, Jai Shri Ram Vanishes in the air")

In 1991 and 1993 elections, Mulayam Singh Yadav transferred his votes to Kanshi Ram's BSP. In undivided UP, BSP contested 164 seats and won 67 while SP contested 256 seats and won 109 in a House of 425, resulting in a coalition government formed with Congress's support from the outside.

On 1 June 1995, Mayawati accused SP of usurping its voters and decided to end the alliance, which the next day led to the infamous and unsavoury `Guesthouse Episode’, where Mayawati came close to being assaulted by SP workers. Since then, the relationship between these two powerful backward caste parties have been tense, leading to a nearly two-decade split and bitter confrontation. In periods when they have managed a truce, they have invariably defeated the BJP, like the 2018 by elections in Phulpur and Gorakhpur.

Though the two parties fought together again in 2019, for the moment, the dye appears to be cast.