Excerpt: Can Mayawati Make a Political Comeback in Uttar Pradesh?

In his book, Ajoy Bose analyses BSP’s performance in UP polls & questions Mayawati’s need to reinvent herself.

File image of Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) chief Mayawati.

(Photo: PTI/Altered by The Quint)

In the 2017 Uttar Pradesh civic polls, the BSP contested the elections on its own symbol for the first time. Four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati, is keen to revive her political fortunes in the state.

Also Read: Inside Mayawati's Quest To Unite UP's Dalits

But can Behenji wrest power again? In a revised edition of his 2008 book, ‘Behenji: The Rise and Fall of Mayawati,’ Ajoy Bose analyses the BSP’s dismal performance in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh polls and asks hard questions about Mayawati’s need to reinvent herself.

Here’s an excerpt.

(Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House. Behenji: The Rise and Fall of Mayawati by Ajoy Bose is available on Amazon. )

Listen to the story here:

UP Polls 2017: Shock, and Then ‘EVM Fraud’

It was counting day and the leads were being flashed fast and thick on the television screen like a hail of bullets mowing down the BSP. The vote machines rang a relentless death knell from the morning for Mayawati as her party’s prospects in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls sank lower and lower with every passing minute. Her old rival, the SP, fared a little better but just about.

Both the regional heavyweights that had dominated state politics for two decades faced decimation. The political balloon floated the night before by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav offering a pact with the BSP supremo to stop the BJP from making the first move in a possible hung assembly has been brutally punctured. There was no suspense any more on whether any party would get a majority.

The BJP had suddenly assumed the proportions of a gigantic T-Rex monster mangling and devouring any opponent that came in its way. This was no ordinary election outcome, it was political carnage.

Around one in the afternoon, with the counting still far from over, but by which time it had become clear that the BSP’s goose was truly cooked, Behehji in a dramatic public appearance addressed the media. This surprised everyone, as the BSP leader in past electoral losses had shown no such alacrity to throw in the towel.

But it soon became clear at the hurriedly called press conference that Mayawati had not come to concede defeat but to raise grave allegations of voting fraud against the BJP government at the Centre. Her face was impassive but one could sense the hysteria as she demanded that the polls be countermanded because the electronic voting machines (EVMs) had been tampered and manipulated with to gift the BJP a record landslide majority.

Mayawati had no specific evidence to back her outrageous charge that the EVMs were fixed to register votes for the BJP even when the voters pressed buttons for other party candidates. But she recalled a mysterious journalist who had warned her at a press conference a few days ago to watch out for rigged EVMs.

‘All of you were there when he warned me. I had never seen him before so I did not pay attention. He was wearing a cap and standing right there. I am sure all of you remember him. He warned me but I didn’t listen to him,’ Behenji lamented in front of her stupefied audience.

Interestingly, none of the journalists, normally quick to heckle the Dalit leader, interrupted her rant or attempted to mock her. Perhaps they themselves were staggered by the enormity of the emerging verdict.

Curtain Call for Behenji?

Yet, despite her newfound humility, outreach to other opposition parties and tinkering with the BSP organisational set-up, the odds are heavily stacked against Mayawati.

While it is possible for her to remain in the political game by being a part of a larger alliance in the limited context of the next national polls, it would take a miracle to revive her former stature.

A major reason for this is that Behenji has neither the will, nor the ability to completely reinvent herself and the BSP which can only be done through a mass agitation to capture the public imagination. Nothing has better illustrated the timid nature of her politics today, than the largely passive role being played by the BSP after the advent of the controversial UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

Apart from making a few token statements, the BSP supremo remained virtually a spectator when the state was rocked by the depredations of cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo squads, along with sweeping measures against slaughterhouses and tanning industries, which affect the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of poor Muslims and Dalits.

In sharp contrast, radical Dalit groups like the Bheem Army are in the thick of things and very much involved in the situation on the ground. For instance, in Saharanpur, a bastion of the Bheem Army, it swiftly scuttled an attempt by the local BJP and RSS workers to start a riot between Dalits and Muslims in the guise of taking a procession on Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary through a minority-dominated area.

Barely a few weeks later, it was the same group of Dalit radicals which took up the cudgels on behalf of their community when local Thakurs tried to stop the installation of a statue of Ambedkar.

Although the Bheem Army and other Dalit activist groups lack the resources and organisational spread of the BSP, they appear to be far more connected and relevant.

In the highly charged political atmosphere that has engulfed Uttar Pradesh after the appointment of a divisive figure like Yogi Adityanath as chief minister, Mayawati’s failure to either intervene or agitate cannot but contribute to her growing irrelevance.

It will no doubt be debated for many years whether the Behenji saga was cut short by rigged voting machines or the far superior Modi-Shah vote catching machine. But the tide of political fortunes wax and wane for leaders depending on whether they reflect the need of a particular historical juncture or era. Both, the rise and fall of Mayawati appear to have been guided by this eternal axiom of politics.

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