Addressing her very first public rally ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Mayawati, president of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), asserted that she was not “missing in action”, as her opponents would like voters to believe. Instead, she pitched a reconstructed “BSP 2.0” where she’s very much in charge, and warned media that the 2022 Assembly polls could be a re-run of 2007, in which the BSP was completely ignored as a contender.
“ Is baar, kuch jaatiwadi media , humari party ka manobal girane main yeh keh kar koyi kasar nahi choti hai ki unki neta kahin nazar nahi aa rahi hai . (A section media, who are ‘casteist’, have been spreading the news with the aim to demoralise BSP workers that the BSP leader is not visible anywhere),” she said, 20 minutes into her speech.
The truth, she said, was that as soon as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic waned, she had returned to Lucknow from Delhi, and for the last year, she had been in Lucknow, reconstructing her party from the scratch, and rebuilding the polling booth-level committees and cadres.
This is the crux of her campaign, too. Her party’s tagline this time is “H ar polling booth k o jitana hai. BSP k o satta main lana hai” , which roughly translates into “we have to win each polling booth to bring BSP to power”.
“In the last one year, I have only gone to Delhi for two days, when my mother died,” she said, repeating the line twice to underline that she has not been missing.
In the last Assembly elections, held in 2017, the BSP had won only 19 seats, which was 5% of the total Assembly seats in the State, but the party secured 22.3% votes. The BSP vote share exceeded that of the Samajwadi Party (SP), which got only 21.82% votes but cornered 47 seats.
She blamed the dismal performance of her party in the last Assembly elections on leaders in her own ranks who “betrayed the party”. Many of whom, she said, had joined the other parties and put up “dummy candidates” in cahoots with opponents. The BSP chief did not name anyone, but the reference to former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Minister Swami Prasad Maurya, who recently joined SP, was not lost on anyone.
“I have paid extra attention to the selection of candidates this time. I have met each one of them before giving them the ticket to avoid a repeat of the betrayal of last time,” she said, indicating course correction.
Ms. Mayawati said that the exercise to reconstruct the booth-level committees and meet the candidates had ended only yesterday, and the first place to which she had decided to come was “Daliton ki Rajdhani”, the Dalits’ capital, Agra.
“I want to tell the media, who have been asking ‘where is behenji ’?’ that behenji has been busy in working towards the U.P. Assembly elections. I also want to tell them, just like the 2007 elections, the results of the 2022 elections will also be equally surprising for them,” she said.
In the 2007 elections, she said, the media did not consider the BSP as a contender, assigning it the third place in a majority of opinion polls. And in 2022, they were repeating the same mistake by branding these elections a bipolar contest, she added.
“Do not believe in any opinion polls,” she exhorted her cadres and voters alike. “In 2007, the opinion polls said that we will come third in the tally, but we won an absolute majority.”
In 2007, the BSP, cornering 30.46% votes, had won 206 seats. Many had already written her, and the BSP’s, political obituary, since the party’s electoral performance has been on a downslide. In 2012, despite getting 25% voteshare, the party got only 80 seats. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it could not win a single seat, and in 2017, it was down to 19.
This time, the party is hopeful that other than its captive vote share of Dalits, it will also gain “ bhaichara vote”, a word used to explain all other castes. All the non-Jatav Dalits and Backward Castes, who are disenchanted with BJP but too scared of the return of the Yadav-dominated regime under the Samajwadi Party, will vote for the BSP — this was the overwhelming narrative at the grounds at Kothi Meena Bazaar, where Ms. Mayawati held Wednesday’s rally.
She was not soft on the BJP, counter to conspiracies that the BSP was helping the ruling government doing the rounds. The BJP, she said, only worked for the “rich capitalist”, and sought to implement the narrow agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the name of religion, the BJP, she said “promotes an atmosphere of hatred and fear”.
Media, she said, hid the BJP’s mistakes and accentuated their achievements. “The BJP government has filled the prisons with innocent people who have been trapped on the basis of their caste and religion. My government will withdraw the cases filled against the protestors over the last few years,” she said. She did not name the Citizenship Amendment Act, but clearly said that her government would not allow the imposition of any controversial laws by the Centre.
But the BSP is well aware that it has to keep the Dalit vote intact to have a shot at power. Ms. Mayawati’s rally was largely aimed at this constituency. She laid out the ways in which each of the three parties — the BJP, the SP and the Congress have been anti-Dalit. The BJP, she said, was ending reservations through the backdoor by privatising every sector. There were 86 reserved seats in U.P. — 84 for Scheduled Castes and two for Scheduled Tribes. In 2007, when she last came to power, the BSP had won 62 of these 86 seats. In 2017, 76 of these reserved seats went to the BJP and its allies.
In the 2017 polls, observers claim, it was her indifference to Muslims, especially after the 2013 Muzzaffarnagar riots, which cost her the minority vote. She was silent on the riots for a long time, and even during her campaign in western Uttar Pradesh, she did not take up the issue. Not willing to make a forced error again, in the Wednesday rally she carefully brought up the riots, blaming the SP for causing communal disharmony.
