The loud noise of Mayawati’s silence

As the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls draw closer, there’s much prattle in political and media circles on the conspicuous silence of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati.

The curiosity is understandable. A former Chief Minister with four non-consecutive stints that collectively added up to over seven years — the longest any UP CM has clocked in over seven decades — Mayawati famously commands a ‘captive vote bank’ among the Dalit community. Dalits constitute over 21% of UP’s electorate and within this formidable bloc, the Jatavs, Mayawati’s own community, comprise a little over 50%.

Behind the silence

The rumours over Mayawati’s absence from the electoral frenzy are varied. There’s the oft-heard buzz over her abject surrender to the BJP in lieu of protection against her prosecution — and that of her brother Anand Kumar — in long-pending cases of corruption and possession of assets disproportionate to their known sources of income.

Her closest aide and political proxy, Rajya Sabha MP Satish Chandra Mishra, has vehemently rebutted these. Behenji, as Mayawati is commonly addressed, “may not be addressing rallies daily but she is working 18 hours a day, monitoring poll preparedness, finalising candidates…and will begin active campaigning soon”, said Mishra.

And then there’s this other theory, as several commentators in Lucknow would relate to explain Mayawati’s increasingly rare public appearances — her fear of being assassinated.

Also read: ‘Laal Topi’ could be BJP’s nemesis in UP… but conditions apply

The hysterical commentaries over the BSP chief’s current absence will, presumably, vanish once she hits the campaign trail. Nonetheless, this scrutiny is instructive of the importance of being Mayawati, once a teacher at a ramshackle Delhi school for children from underprivileged backgrounds much like herself. Dalit icon, the late Kanshi Ram, had pushed her into politics, eventually pivoting her to become the first Dalit woman CM of UP and subsequently bequeathed to her his enormous legacy.

A poll agenda sans Dalits

However, a pitfall of this spotlight on Behenji is that it diverts focus from the gradual dismemberment of Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan movement on Mayawati’s watch and the precipice at which UP’s Dalits stand today. “For the first time in over 30 years, Dalits are not on the agenda of any political party in the UP elections…aaj UP ka Dalit phir hashiye par hai aur iski sabse badi gunaahgaar Mayawati hi hain (‘UP’s Dalit is, once again, on the fringe and Mayawati is the main culprit’),” Dalit activist and writer Ravi Kant Chandan, a professor of Hindi at the Lucknow University, told The Federal.

Chandan said the “bigger concern for Dalits in UP is not Mayawati’s silence but the fact that despite crimes against the community increasing by almost 150% in the five years of Yogi Adityanath’s rule, neither the BSP nor Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party chief and former UP CM) want to make this a poll issue.”

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra “is vocal against these atrocities and makes the effort to personally meet the victims in many cases”, he conceded, but pointed out: “Her party is absent at the grassroots and isn’t a viable electoral option for the Dalits in most parts of the State.”

According to a written reply provided by the Union Home Ministry in the Lok Sabha during the recently concluded Winter Session of Parliament, UP accounted for the maximum number of cases — 36,471 out of 139,045 — of crimes against scheduled castes across all States in the period between 2018 and 2020.

The gang rape of a 19-year-old woman in Hathras by upper caste men made international news. The woman succumbed to her injuries days later at a Delhi hospital and her last rites were hurriedly performed by the administration in the dead of night despite objections from her family. 

Other notable cases of caste-related hate crimes include the alleged custodial death of Arun Valmiki, a sanitation worker, at a police station in Agra, the gang-rape of a 22-year-old woman in Balrampur, an acid attack on three minor Dalit sisters in Gonda and, most recently, a viral video that showed upper caste men mercilessly beating a Dalit girl in Amethi.

Rising crime, tempered criticism

Through each of these instances, Mayawati’s standard response has been that of posting a perfunctory tweet condemning the incident, criticising the BJP government in the State for deteriorating law and order and, in the same ‘thread’, attacking the Congress or other political rivals for “politicising the incident”.

It is pertinent to recall that amid the outrage over the Hathras gang-rape, Opposition leaders cutting across party lines — Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, Jayant Chaudhary of the RLD and even Derek O’ Brien and others from the Trinamool Congress that has no presence in UP — had defied the administration’s prohibitory orders to visit the victim’s family. Mayawati, however, made no such effort despite her self-professed political identity of a Dalit ki beti.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that today, the anger amongst vast sections of the Dalits, with the exception of the Jatavs, against the BSP for betraying them is second only to the anger they have against the ruling BJP for allowing or, in some cases, even abetting such crimes,” Ram Kumar, co-founder of the Dynamic Action Group (DAG), a collective of nearly five dozen UP-based Dalit rights NGOs, told The Federal.

The non-Jatav Dalits (some 60 castes of varying numerical strength that collectively comprise nearly 50% of the total Dalit population of UP) had begun to get disillusioned with Mayawati after the BSP’s first complete run in power between 2007 and 2012, said Kumar.

“By 2014, several of the non-Jatav Dalit communities had begun to walk away from the BSP. The BJP was wooing them aggressively by fielding candidates from among these communities like the Valmikis, Sonkars, Pasis and Koris (President Ram Nath Kovind is a Kori). This trend solidified in 2017 and helped the BJP sweep the polls; it won 67 of the SC reserved seats while the BSP got only two…now Dalits are being persecuted under BJP rule but since the BSP is keeping quiet, they are compelled to look for other options,” he added.

Community equations

A key reason for the disaffection among non-Jatav Dalits with the BSP is also the perception that Mayawati, during her last stint as CM, had patronised only members of her own Jatav community. “She did nothing for us then and she is doing nothing for us today. Only two communities matter to her — Jatavs and Brahmins,” Amar Mangal, a Dalit daily wage worker in eastern UP’s Maharajganj, told The Federal. “Even there, she seems to have given full control to Brahmins because she feels that Jatavs, being her own people, will continue to vote for her whether or not she helps them.”

The perception that Mayawati has been increasingly tilting towards the Brahmins is one that has angered many of her former supporters. “She has turned Ambedkarwaad (the philosophy of Dalit icon Dr  BR Ambedkar) on its head. A party that evolved from Kanshi Ram’s slogan of Thakur, Brahman, Bania chhor, baki sab hain DS4 (‘With the exception of Thakurs, Brahmins and Banias, everyone else is DS4’), and had once boldly declared Mile Mulayam-Kanshi Ram, hawa ho gaye Jai Shri Ram (‘When Mulayam and Kashi Ram come together, the ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chant vanishes) is today relying on Satish Mishra (a Brahmin) for mobilisation and raising slogans of Jai Shri Ram to woo upper castes,” said Laxman Pasi, a BSP worker in Bankati village of Gorakhpur. DS4 (Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangarsh Samiti) is a Dalit emancipation forum founded by Kanshi Ram in 1981, as a precursor to the BSP.

Over the past few months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Adityanath have unleashed a blitzkrieg of multi-crore project inaugurations for UP in the hope of retaining the State in the BJP kitty. Akhilesh, seen as the BJP’s closest challenger in the upcoming polls, has been criss-crossing the State atop his Vijay Rath. Even the otherwise comatose Congress, pushed to the fringes of UP politics over the past three decades, is displaying an appetite for a concerted fight for revival under Priyanka’s stewardship.

Rarefied presence in poll time

Mayawati, meanwhile, has left all campaigning to Mishra, who has been addressing public meetings on her behalf. Since the 2019 elections, which she contested in alliance with bitter rival SP to make a comeback in the Lok Sabha with 10 seats against the zero that BSP registered in 2014, Mayawati has addressed fewer than half-a-dozen rallies in UP.

Her rare public appearances have been by way of occasional press conferences where she reads out statements and avoids answering many questions. Through this time, she has managed to alienate most of her former colleagues — of the 19 BSP candidates who won the 2017 polls, a majority have either been sacked by her or have switched to other outfits; only three remain BSP MLAs today.

This downward slide, said a BSP leader, requesting anonymity, is a “direct consequence of Mayawati’s fear and insecurities, her ideological compromises and the supremo culture that she cultivated over the years.”

“She stopped meeting ordinary people during the last couple of years of her chief ministerial stint. She is completely disconnected from reality. Her advisors have convinced her that the 2007 victory was because of the Brahmins when the fact is that Dalits, Muslims and a large chunk of backward castes voted for her in that election, while we got only about 11% of the Brahmin vote,” said the BSP leader. “Today, you have Satish Mishra running the party. A party that originated from the Bahujan movement has become steeped in Savarna (upper caste) politics. Behenji can’t understand the simple thing that a Dalit comes to a BSP rally to listen to her, not to see the Dalit ki beti being flanked by upper caste members, not to listen to Satish Mishra.”

Back to square one

Professor Chandan believes that with the BSP’s 2007 slogan of Hathi nahi Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu Mahesh hai (‘This isn’t an elephant – the BSP poll symbol – but Lord Ganesh and the Hindu holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh’), Mayawati essentially laid the groundwork for the BJP’s strategy to subsume Dalit identity into its “majoritarian Hindutva identity politics”.

“Within 15 years of the first BSP government with a clear majority, that came as a ray of hope for Dalit emancipation, UP’s Dalit has returned to the same hell of the varna system where the BJP wants him to say he is a Hindu and then oppress him for being a Dalit. If Mayawati wanted, she could have done so much to help the Bahujan cause because there was genuinely an awareness during her rule among the Dalits of their rights. All this has been lost now and the most unfortunate part is that this isn’t as much the fault of the BJP — they are doing the politics they have always done — but of Mayawati,” Chandan added.

Which way will the Dalit vote go?

With elections due in two months, where do the Dalits go? Kumar feels a large number of non-Jatav Dalits from numerically strong communities like the Valmikis, Pasis and Sonkars will vote for the SP, “only because they want to see the BJP out and the BSP is not in a position to return to power”.

The big question, though, remains whether the Jatavs — roughly 11% of the State’s population — will still rally behind Mayawati. “The older generation will give Mayawati another chance but the younger lot — the first, second or third time voter who is frustrated with unemployment — will vote tactically,” said Kumar.

Atrocities aside, unemployment is a major issue for Dalits and on this there is no difference of opinion among Jatavs and non-Jatavs — all of them want to vote out Yogi. “The younger lot of Jatav voters, who are educated and aware, will see which candidate from the Opposition parties can defeat the BJP candidate and they will vote for her/him; the BSP won’t be a default choice,” said Kumar.

A BSP MP, who did not wish to be named, agreed with Kumar’s view but insisted that the percentage of Jatav voters moving away from the BSP “will not be substantial.” The Jatavs will “wait for Mayawati’s appeal for votes and for her campaign; in non-reserved seats they may vote against the BSP nominee if the party fields a Brahmin but I doubt they will vote for the SP nominee because the Jatav-Yadav rivalry is centuries old and won’t be forgotten only because Akhilesh is in a position to win,” the MP added.

Where Akhilesh erred

Chandan said Akhilesh could have been the biggest beneficiary of this churn within UP’s Dalit vote bank had he worked conscientiously to win their favour. 

“After the BSP-SP coalition of 2019, Akhilesh had taken some positive steps. He showed a lot of respect towards Mayawati, perhaps even at the cost of his party’s dedicated backward caste votes, and a section of Dalits were genuinely looking at him with hope. His statement that the two wheels of the bicycle (the SP’s poll symbol) signify Samajwad and Ambedkarwaad, was appreciated,” said the professor. 

“However, after Mayawati broke the alliance, he too showed little interest towards the Dalits. When Hathras happened, he was missing. When other crimes against Dalits took place, he didn’t even tweet. Now he is trying to win their support because elections are close.”

The BSP MP quoted earlier said the Congress, which has been actively wooing the Dalits since the Hathras tragedy, may make some significant gains in constituencies where communities like the Valmikis are in significant numbers.

“Priyanka Gandhi has been constantly reaching out to the Dalits but her focus on the Valmiki samaj is clear. In the Hathras case and also in Agra, the victims were Valmikis and Priyanka was the first politician to reach out to their families. In Lucknow too, she went to a Valmiki samaj basti and swept the floor of the Valmiki Mandir. From what I hear, she is also regularly in touch with several Dalit victims and kin of caste-related atrocities and makes sure that her party colleagues keep following up in these areas. I can’t say if the Congress will win in such seats but certainly in terms of vote share, they will perform better,” the MP added.