Mayawati has made it clear that she will be making a solo run to regain power in Uttar Pradesh in next year’s Assembly polls. She has also warned her opponents to stay off her core Dalit vote bank while indicating the importance to her of wooing a new growing support base among the Muslim minority in the state.
The Bahujan Samaj Party chief sent out these and several other key political signals at the vast public rally organised last week by her party to celebrate Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary in the state capital Lucknow in perhaps her most significant speech since the BSP’s Lok Sabha poll debacle in 2014.
A giant placard held up by her supporters showed Mayawati in an overcoat and sari flanked by Babasaheb and Kanshi Ram on either side. They were standing in front of the giant memorial built by her government when in power a decade ago to honour icons of the Dalit movement as elephants frolicked on the grass below while a small replica of Buddha smiled benignly from the sky above. Across the placard was scrawled in capital letters “NEXT CM”.
Campaign 2017
The symbolism at the rally and the import of Mayawati’s speech underlined that this was indeed the launch of her campaign for the state Assembly polls still one year away. Interestingly much of the speech was devoted to the perfidy of other political parties in laying false claims to the legacy of Babasaheb Ambedkar and their devious attempts to steal the Dalit vote. She spared nobody.
Unleashing a scathing attack on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Sangh Parivar, Mayawati pointedly described him and those Bharatiya Janata Party leaders who are backward castes or Dalits as “bonded labourers” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its upper caste agenda. She was particularly harsh on Keshav Prasad Maurya, the newly appointed backward caste BJP chief in Uttar Pradesh accusing him of having a “criminal and communal” record. She also debunked the BJP’s efforts to revive the Ram Mandir issue, describing it as a trap to fool the Dalits.
“Our messiah is Babasaheb Ambedkar not Lord Rama,” Mayawati asserted in a significant departure from her party’s bid some years ago to invoke Hindu gods to enlist the support of upper castes particularly Brahmins in elections.
Yet if the BSP leader’s biting criticism of the Prime Minister and his party scotched speculation about a secret deal between her and the BJP before or after the state elections, she did the same to any possible collaboration with the Congress for the coming polls. Indeed, Mayawati spent even more time in lambasting the Congress recalling the humiliation of Ambedkar by its past leaders as well as listing the disastrous record of successive Congress governments in redressing Dalit grievances and addressing their demands. She openly ridiculed the Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for his “immaturity” in comparing Rohith Vemula, the Hyderabad University Dalit research scholar who recently committed suicide, with Babasaheb.
Nor did the BSP leader appear impressed with the Left’s new inclination towards Ambedkar and Dalit politics. Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, who has been advocating an alliance between leftwing and Ambedkarite politics, got short shrift from Mayawati who pointed out that he belonged to an upper caste and subscribed to the communist ideology that radically differed from that espoused by Ambedkar.
Even Rohith Vemula was not spared. Mayawati, while expressing her respect for his commitment to Ambedkarite politics, maintained that he should not have taken his life and instead followed the example of Ambedkar who too was humiliated and hounded but continued to fight to get justice for the Dalits.
Snub to Left
By criticising leftists like Kanhaiya Kumar who are looking to engage with Ambedkarite politics, Mayawati has made it clear that she is not going to take kindly to others poaching into what she consider her own turf of Dalit politics. Similarly her annoyance with the adulation of Vemula as a new Dalit icon, even if sympathetic to the circumstances of his tragic demise, reveals her reluctance to accept a new addition to the already established Dalit pantheon. She maintained, with perhaps some justification, that there was a big difference between Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram and herself who have fought against adversaries and atrocities to take the Dalit cause forward and Vemula who ended his life implying that Dalit politics was not about victimhood but empowerment.
Another vital aspect of Mayawati’s speech was her espousal of Muslim minority issues including a fierce criticism of the Modi government’s efforts to change the minority status of the Aligarh Muslim University and the Jamia Millia Islamia. Her growing outreach to the Muslim minority was emphasised by her special thanks for organising the public rally to her close Muslim aide Naseemuddin Siddiqui, even as she appreciated long trusted Brahmin lieutenant Satish Mishra for his media management.
Muslims will also be happy with Mayawati’s unequivocal repudiation of recent communal campaigns like love jihad and beef ban, which she said was a way of diverting public attention from the Modi government’s failures. As for the “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” controversy, Mayawati was even more categorical. “People of my party say Jai Bhim and Jai Bharat. Others say Jai Hind,” making it clear that she was not going to be bulldozed by nationalism.
The other big message delivered by Mayawati at the rally was that while she was committed to the Dalit cause and sympathetic to the grievances of the Muslim minority she was now looking beyond the politics of identity. “ I can promise you that after coming back to power I shall build no more memorials but focus on work”, clearly responding to the widespread criticism of her statue-building spree during her last stint in power.