The decision to dissolve all organisational committees of the Bahujan Samaj Party was not the only outcome of the closed-door meeting held by Mayawati in Lucknow on Tuesday. The faint outline also emerged of a strategy the BSP chief is contemplating to bring her party back from political oblivion.
The Dalit-led party did not win a single seat in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, despite gathering around 19% of the votes in Uttar Pradesh. In 2009, it had 21 members in the Lok Sabha, one of them from Madhya Pradesh.
The new strategy, which aims to build a new social alliance between Dalits and Muslims by creating a clear split in the "M-Y" (Muslim-Yadav) social base of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, was embedded in her remark that while Yadavs had drifted towards the BJP, Muslims voted for the SP in the elections. These choices decimated the BSP in the state.
According to a BSP leader who was present in the Lucknow meeting of the party’s functionaries from across the country, the party will make an effort to get Muslims to realise that they could no longer trust their old alliance with Yadavs and so should align with Dalits.
In a state where Dalits and Muslims together account for around 40% of the population, a combination of the two could prove formidable. But it isn't clear whether such an alliance can be forged. What is certain, however, is that the BSP is yet to make a serious attempt to move away from traditional politics and harness the anger and frustration of youth, particularly those from marginal sections.
Immediately after the assembly elections of 2012, in which the BSP lost power to the Samajwadi Party, Ramsamhar Ram, an associate of party founder Kanshi Ram and an active grassroots leader in Ambedkar Nagar district, had told this reporter that the social justice plank would not be strong enough for Mayawati going ahead. “The slogan of social justice gave the BSP huge traction for over two decades,” he had said. “That slogan is still relevant but a new generation has emerged which is impatient and which looks for economic empowerment as well.”
After the BSP's latest debacle, he stuck to his point: "What I told you then remains true even now."
In politics, diagnosing what is going wrong is easier than figuring out how to fix it. Clearly, Mayawati’s latest attempt to broaden her party’s social base by forging an alliance between Muslims and Dalits may yield some temporary relief, but, as Ramsamhar says, she can take the Bahujan movement forward only if she pays special attention to the issues of economic empowerment of lower castes and weaker sections, and tries to exploit the opportunities provided by the policies of economic liberalisation.
Traditional politics has its limitations. Until the last election, it seems to have worked. Yet the identity-based vote-banks started becoming weak with the talk of a “Gujarat Model” percolating down to the village level, making many caste-bound voters, particularly those belonging to younger generation, feel left behind.
Even some of the old strategies of the BSP proved to be counterproductive. Mayawati’s efforts to broaden her party’s vote base through the strategy of "Sarvajan" (allying with upper castes) hit the party badly. On the one hand, it made the "Bahujan" (Dalits and the most backward castes) insecure, and on the other hand it went against the BSP’s original goal of removing caste-based hierarchies and discrimination.
Brahmins, who constitute about 8% of the population in Uttar Pradesh and account for 10% to 20% of the votes in half of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha constituencies, always preferred the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party. Only when these parties started declining in UP did they shift to the BSP. But the shift was temporary and was bound to be undone at any opportune moment. The resurgence of the BJP in the recent Lok Sabha election provided this moment to these sections, who did not think twice before leaving the BSP high.
The shift from being Bahujan to Sarvajan – trying to enjoy the support of all sections of society, particularly Brahmins – did pay off in the beginning. But of late, Mayawati has been finding it increasingly difficult to sustain her claims, particularly among non-Jatav Dalits, that her party represents all Dalits. Jatavs constitute 55% of Dalits.
As the results of the Lok Sabha election show, Mayawati failed to convince her Dalit voters that the BSP remained “their” party despite mobilising the upper castes. The absence of any BSP-led movement on the ground and complete abandonment of the cadre training programmes for almost a decade, further eroded the BSP’s ability to mobilise a strong Dalit core.
The cumulative effect has been a successive decline n the party’s vote share. In the state elections of 2007, in which the BSP got an absolute majority in the UP Assembly, the party’s vote share stood at 30%, which was highest ever since its inception in 1984. Thereafter, the party’s vote share has been falling continuously. It came down to 27% in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, 25% in the assembly elections of 2012 and a little over 19% in the recent polls.
What is worse, Mayawati is not being able decipher the signals emanating from the grassroots. All that she has done is to work more intensely on traditional lines, adding up new castes to her Dalit core through social engineering based on symbolic politics. Her latest attempt to sew up a Dalit-Muslim alliance is no different from her previous experiments. As in the past, this experiment, too, lacks any scope to accommodate the aspirational changes taking place in the younger generations of Dalits and other weaker sections.
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The Dalit-led party did not win a single seat in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, despite gathering around 19% of the votes in Uttar Pradesh. In 2009, it had 21 members in the Lok Sabha, one of them from Madhya Pradesh.
The new strategy, which aims to build a new social alliance between Dalits and Muslims by creating a clear split in the "M-Y" (Muslim-Yadav) social base of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, was embedded in her remark that while Yadavs had drifted towards the BJP, Muslims voted for the SP in the elections. These choices decimated the BSP in the state.
According to a BSP leader who was present in the Lucknow meeting of the party’s functionaries from across the country, the party will make an effort to get Muslims to realise that they could no longer trust their old alliance with Yadavs and so should align with Dalits.
In a state where Dalits and Muslims together account for around 40% of the population, a combination of the two could prove formidable. But it isn't clear whether such an alliance can be forged. What is certain, however, is that the BSP is yet to make a serious attempt to move away from traditional politics and harness the anger and frustration of youth, particularly those from marginal sections.
Immediately after the assembly elections of 2012, in which the BSP lost power to the Samajwadi Party, Ramsamhar Ram, an associate of party founder Kanshi Ram and an active grassroots leader in Ambedkar Nagar district, had told this reporter that the social justice plank would not be strong enough for Mayawati going ahead. “The slogan of social justice gave the BSP huge traction for over two decades,” he had said. “That slogan is still relevant but a new generation has emerged which is impatient and which looks for economic empowerment as well.”
After the BSP's latest debacle, he stuck to his point: "What I told you then remains true even now."
In politics, diagnosing what is going wrong is easier than figuring out how to fix it. Clearly, Mayawati’s latest attempt to broaden her party’s social base by forging an alliance between Muslims and Dalits may yield some temporary relief, but, as Ramsamhar says, she can take the Bahujan movement forward only if she pays special attention to the issues of economic empowerment of lower castes and weaker sections, and tries to exploit the opportunities provided by the policies of economic liberalisation.
Traditional politics has its limitations. Until the last election, it seems to have worked. Yet the identity-based vote-banks started becoming weak with the talk of a “Gujarat Model” percolating down to the village level, making many caste-bound voters, particularly those belonging to younger generation, feel left behind.
Even some of the old strategies of the BSP proved to be counterproductive. Mayawati’s efforts to broaden her party’s vote base through the strategy of "Sarvajan" (allying with upper castes) hit the party badly. On the one hand, it made the "Bahujan" (Dalits and the most backward castes) insecure, and on the other hand it went against the BSP’s original goal of removing caste-based hierarchies and discrimination.
Brahmins, who constitute about 8% of the population in Uttar Pradesh and account for 10% to 20% of the votes in half of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha constituencies, always preferred the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party. Only when these parties started declining in UP did they shift to the BSP. But the shift was temporary and was bound to be undone at any opportune moment. The resurgence of the BJP in the recent Lok Sabha election provided this moment to these sections, who did not think twice before leaving the BSP high.
The shift from being Bahujan to Sarvajan – trying to enjoy the support of all sections of society, particularly Brahmins – did pay off in the beginning. But of late, Mayawati has been finding it increasingly difficult to sustain her claims, particularly among non-Jatav Dalits, that her party represents all Dalits. Jatavs constitute 55% of Dalits.
As the results of the Lok Sabha election show, Mayawati failed to convince her Dalit voters that the BSP remained “their” party despite mobilising the upper castes. The absence of any BSP-led movement on the ground and complete abandonment of the cadre training programmes for almost a decade, further eroded the BSP’s ability to mobilise a strong Dalit core.
The cumulative effect has been a successive decline n the party’s vote share. In the state elections of 2007, in which the BSP got an absolute majority in the UP Assembly, the party’s vote share stood at 30%, which was highest ever since its inception in 1984. Thereafter, the party’s vote share has been falling continuously. It came down to 27% in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, 25% in the assembly elections of 2012 and a little over 19% in the recent polls.
What is worse, Mayawati is not being able decipher the signals emanating from the grassroots. All that she has done is to work more intensely on traditional lines, adding up new castes to her Dalit core through social engineering based on symbolic politics. Her latest attempt to sew up a Dalit-Muslim alliance is no different from her previous experiments. As in the past, this experiment, too, lacks any scope to accommodate the aspirational changes taking place in the younger generations of Dalits and other weaker sections.