Mayawati’s risky calculus

Mayawati’s risky calculus

After the shock of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when it got no seats in Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party has sought to forge a Dalit-Muslim alliance to revive its fortunes in the coming Assembly elections in the State. The party has fielded 98 Muslim candidates, the highest number for any party or alliance in the fray, and a clear departure from the grand social alliance (sarvajan hitay) with which it had swept the 2007 Assembly elections. The party would also be counting on its traditional pitch of ensuring law and order compared to its rivals. This is why the induction into the BSP of Mukhtar Ansari, an eastern U.P. strongman who faces serious criminal charges, along with his relatives, puts the spotlight on how the party chief, Ms. Mayawati, may be refining her strategy — and how her back-to-basics social alliance will square off against her party’s record of being tough on the law and order front. Mr. Ansari had been expelled from the BSP in 2010 for alleged criminal activities. His antecedents made news recently when he merged his political party, the Quami Ekta Dal, with the Samajwadi Party in October 2016. This had Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav rise in protest against his uncle Shivpal Yadav and use the development to project himself as a ‘clean’ politician.
For Ms. Mayawati, Mr. Ansari’s return to the BSP could help consolidate support from Muslims on the basis of identity, as she tries to secure her old vote banks. Dalits are 21% of the population in U.P. When it first came to power with a full majority in the Assembly in 2007, the BSP adopted a “sarva-samaj” rhetoric, assured of support from its Dalit base. But since then, Dalits have steadily moved away, notably to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the communally charged 2014 election, without any fresh accrual of support from other communities. Ms. Mayawati has realised over time that she has to appeal to her core support base among Dalits — which she has done over the past year after attacks on the community in different parts of the country sharpened the contradictions in the Sangh Parivar’s Dalit outreach. Reaching out to Muslims was the next logical step — they constitute 18% of the population in the State, and a Dalit-Muslim alliance is the BSP’s way of forging a winning strategy. Ms. Mayawati’s gamble of relying on narrow identity politics to counter her rivals is a risky one, and how the party’s appeal compares to the SP-Congress alliance’s is still an open question.