“Humare paas bhi gora chitta jawan hai (we also have a fair and handsome young man) who could answer political opponents and the media in their language.” This was the impression of a senior Bahujan Samaj Party leader in western Uttar Pradesh about the party’s then-national coordinator Akash Anand when he addressed a rally in Ghaziabad on April 7.
A month later, Mr. Anand, who completed a post-graduate degree in London before joining politics, was sacked from the position by his aunt and BSP supremo Mayawati, after he was booked for a model poll code violation for using abusive language against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in his speeches.
Party sources are quiet on their party chief’s decision to remove Mr. Anand till “he becomes mature”, but they do point out the parts of Mr. Anand’s speeches that were not unparliamentary and seemed politically mature.
Targeting the BJP
A look at his speeches, right from the Ghaziabad rally, indicates that he was targeting the BJP much more pointedly than the Samajwadi Party. He questioned the “financial prudence” of the BJP’s ration doles and described it is “an opium that is being fed to 80 crore Indians”. He went on to make impromptu calculations to tell the audience that they would have eaten much better had the government ensured even class IV jobs for them. “You would have made at least ₹2.5 lakh a year but now you are getting, at the most, ₹12,000 a year in the form of ration.” He alleged that ₹2 lakh crore of people’s taxes go into feeding 80 crore Indians. “This tax money, which should have gone into making schools, hospitals, and providing clean water, is being spent on ration,” he noted.
He also underlined that the BSP is the only party which came out clean in the recent revelation of electoral bond scheme data. It was only after he felt that the audience was not responding to his maths and English phrases that he would switch to a more aggressive tone, perhaps to match the emerging competition from Chandra Shekhar Azad of the Azad Samaj Party.
‘BJP’s B-team’
Observers said that his speeches did not go down well with the ruling dispensation. It also pushed the right-wing ecosystem to question the source of the BSP’s funding. Mr. Anand’s removal in the middle of the election process is being seen as the BSP’s surrender to the BJP, which will help the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance. Now there is no fig leaf left for the BSP to hide behind as far as Ms. Mayawati’s Muslim vote bank is concerned, and the Jatavs are also puzzled.
There is a section in her community that feels that she is running with the hare and hunting with the wolves in this election. Though she has fielded 20 Muslims and four Yadavs to scuttle the chances of the SP, there are several seats where her candidates are also making the BJP sweat it out this summer.
From the outside, a look at the profile of BSP candidates suggests two things. One, as always, the party has picked those who can fund their election themselves. Second, the caste and religion profiles of the candidates suggests that, this time, the party has carefully picked candidates who can harm the prospects of both the SP and the BJP depending on who is the bigger competitor for a particular seat. However, as the date for the last round of nominations came nearer, it appeared that the party was in a hurry to change candidates and bring in those that would hurt the prospects of the SP. It again gave wing to the ‘BJP’s B-team’ charge against the party and the speculation that the direction of the wind is changing gained some momentum.
Shifting votebank
Sources in the BAMCEF (Backward and Minorities Communities Employees Federation) said that the answer lay in the tacit shift in the party’s core vote bank towards the SP-Congress alliance in some seats that voted in the first three phases. “After the dismissal, the message in the community is clear. Bakre ki maa, apne bachche ko katne se bacha rahi hai (The mother of the goat is saving her kid from slaughter), but some also feel that there is an inherent message for the community,” said a senior BAMCEF member in Etah.
In fact, it is the BAMCEF, founded by the late Kanshi Ram and once the ideological fountainhead of the BSP, that is being seen as the force behind the shift in the Jatav vote towards the Congress-SP alliance in the State in some seats. BAMCEF members are working in the rural belt to impress upon the community that the organisation could nullify the impact of the RSS, and that, over the last few years, the BSP has not given the social organisation its due in the political sphere. “Politicians come and go but the interests of the community are paramount,” a member said.
In some seats like Agra and Bulandshahr, he said, saving the identity of the Ambedkarite movement felt more important to the community than saving the reservation; in several other seats, however, it is the other way round. “Yadav and Jatav feuds were decided by the bullet in the past but this time we are on the same side to save the Constitution and reservation. We are not surrendering ourselves to the SP. It is just a compromise formula for a common goal,” he said.
Buckling under BJP pressure
The BJP and BSP share a long love-hate relationship in the State. In 2022, in an interview in the middle of a bipolar Assembly election, Union Home Minister Amit Shah praised Ms. Mayawati’s performance, leading to speculation. This time, however, Ms. Mayawati took two strange decisions after Mr. Shah’s visit to Lucknow last week.
Apart from dismissing Mr. Anand, she also changed the ticket of Shrikala Reddy, wife of Rajput strongman Dhananjay Singh, days after he got bail. Jaunpur is the only seat where the BSP had a realistic chance of securing a victory. While BSP sources said that Mrs. Reddy was planning to withdraw her candidature after an arrangement with the BJP, Mr. Singh has denied the charges and accused the BSP of buckling under pressure. As the polling moves towards the eastern parts of the State, the BSP’s prospects seem to be going south.
