Resignation drama on mayawati and bsp's struggle

Resignation drama on mayawati and bsp's struggle

Mayawati is struggling to be politically relevant and retrieve the viability of the BSP.
The resignation of Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati from her Rajya Sabha seat on Tuesday provided the high drama in the opening days of Parliament’s monsoon session. But it was easy to understand why she is giving up the little she has in Parliament in order to raise her political profile. In fact, as he joined other Opposition leaders to line up moral support for her, Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad inadvertently highlighted the position of weakness from which she is launching her fightback. He would help get her re-elected to the Rajya Sabha from Bihar, he said. The BSP, with just 19 seats in the 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly, does not have sufficient numbers to ensure the former U.P. Chief Minister’s re-election, something she would have needed less than a year from now anyway. But Ms. Mayawati’s fight is not for a seat in the House, it is for her very relevance. Successive elections have confirmed the squeeze. From being presumed to be both the prime ministerial candidate of the Third Front in 2009 and the beneficiary in 2017 of the cracks in the Samajwadi Party and the expected blowback of the Narendra Modi government’s demonetisation exercise, she now finds herself to be little more than an aside.
Ms. Mayawati herself gave away her predicament by the choice of issue she sought extra time for on the floor of the House: denial of permission for a Dalit procession in Saharanpur on April 14, B.R. Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. If on the one hand the BSP finds the BJP taking away large segments of the Dalit vote, the rise of forces like the Bhim Army in Saharanpur with a more fiery Dalit assertion threatens to leave her behind. The challenge for her is nothing less than crafting the next chapter in the BSP’s evolution. The party had first tasted electoral success under Kanshi Ram’s mentorship, with a call for an alliance of the oppressed, along caste, gender and religious lines, to transform society and politics so that they were not simply accommodated through symbolic handouts — but the world around them progressed rapidly for them to win their rightful political space. This aspiration was worked into his strategy of forcing political instability, so that every churn would give the BSP a shot at expanding its base. The next phase took place on Ms. Mayawati’s watch when she crafted a bottom-up rainbow coalition of Dalits, Muslims and upper castes, and got a full majority in the 2007 State elections. With its skilful rewrite of the holding majoritarian narrative and its organisational aggression, the BJP has cherry-picked from that coalition. So much so that the BSP is in an existential struggle to hold on to its core base. More than any other party, the BSP has relied as much on its organisation as on its modernising message. She needs to refresh both.