The Bahujan Samaj Party is at a crossroads. It was wiped out in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and it came a very poor third in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. Its traditional Scheduled Castes vote has begun to migrate. The non-Jatavs have switched over to the Bharatiya Janata Party and sections of the Jatav votes etc too have started flirting with the BJP.
Fearing an exodus, BSP supremo Mayawati has become hyper-active when she gets reports of atrocities on Scheduled Caste members in the country, and particularly so in a BJP-ruled State. In such cases, she turns what may be a law and order failure into an upper caste versus Scheduled Caste conflict. The BJP too is sensitive about such matters. It does not want its Scheduled Caste outreach, which is a work in progress, to be aborted. It has become common for senior party leaders to partake of lunch or dinner at the homes of Scheduled Caste families.
While for the BJP, the Scheduled Castes votes are part of its larger game-plan which includes the luring of Other Backward Classes through giving a constitutional status to the OBC commission, for Mayawati the Scheduled Castes are her party’s bread and butter. This has become more so after the BSP’s failure to win over the Muslim community despite giving its candidates close to a 100 seats to contest the last Assembly election. Winning over the affection of the minority community has become her second challenge — the first being retaining her Scheduled Caste votes.
Mayawati will find gaining the minority community’s confidence a hard nut to crack. True, she did achieve this in the 2007 Assembly poll in Uttar Pradesh and the BSP won that contest riding on the Scheduled Castes-Muslim combine. Since then, however, the Muslims have slipped out of her grip. She could not even take advantage of a fragmented Samajwadi Party in the last Assembly election and woo the minority voters.
The Muslims still voted largely for the Samajwadi Party, though the SP failed to capitalise on it because of the non-Yadav OBC and majority community polarisation which happened in the BJP’s favour. Mayawati’s decision to field a record number of Muslim candidates actually backfired because these contestants effectively split the minority votes and allowed the BJP candidates to romp home.
Another electoral defeat, even in something as relatively insignificant as local body elections, and BSP and Mayawati will be staring at oblivion. It takes as much effort to win over lost trust as it takes to gain trust; indeed, it takes more to regain. Once the BSP’s core voters desert her repeatedly, they are not going to return to the party very soon. Twice is catastrophic enough, a third time will spell doom for Mayawati.
The BSP’s Scheduled Caste voters will not be floundering minus the BSP; the BJP is there to take them into its fold. The Samajwadi Party stands no chance here because the Scheduled Caste voters will not easily forget the torment they have suffered at the hands of the Yadav community whenever the SP ruled the State. The experience of the last five years is too fresh in memory. The Congress, now partnering the SP, gets excluded from the Scheduled Caste orbit straightaway, and no amount of outreach from senior party leaders helmed by Rahul Gandhi, can change this reality.
Optimists will argue that both Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party are showing signs of working together to counter Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP’s might. They will add that both of them are on the same page on the choice of a presidential candidate. But it’s one thing for Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav to come together and another for their respective party workers at the grassroots level to work together. If the latter does not happen, and there is no indication it will, drawing room coalitions cannot click. A fresh example is the failure of the Congress-SP alliance in Uttar Pradesh.
In any case, it would be foolhardy of Mayawati to depend on external parties to revive her party’s fortunes, more so when these parties are her rivals at their core. She has to get back to the drawing board. From all indications, she still believes in her ability to attract the minority votes — and for this reason alone she would not want to give oxygen to the SP. Although she has sacked Naseemuddin Siddiqui, the Muslim face of her party, she has tried to contain the damage by re-inducting into the party a few Muslim leaders whom she had sacked earlier, probably at Siddiqui’s behest.
Siddiqui has formed his own outfit which is not going to take him far. But it has the potential to cause serious damage to Mayawati’s plans to win back the minority community. Siddiqui may not be a pan-Uttar Pradesh leader, but he has enough pockets of influence in Muslim-dominated constituencies. To that extent, he can even be a threat to the SP’s hegemony over minority votes. But there is a tantalising possibility of his joining hands with the SP to spite Mayawati. Senior Samajwadi party leader Azam Khan’s recent statement almost in favour of the former BSP leader can be viewed in this context.
(The writer is a senior political commentator and public affairs analyst)
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