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Journalism of Courage
Over the last few years, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Mayawati, has reshuffled her party brass several times. She has changed the BSP’s UP unit president four times in four years and the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha five times in three years.
On Tuesday, Mayawati appointed Vishwanath Pal, an MBC leader, as the new BSP president in UP. Pal replaced Bhimram Rajbhar, who has been made coordinator of the party’s Bihar unit.
“While Pal belongs to the most backward class, Rajbhar is from the backward class. This is a significant change vis-a-vis caste equations in the state. After a long time, the party has appointed a leader from the most backward class as the state president,” a BSP leader said.
Rajbhar was appointed as the UP party chief in November 2020, replacing former MP Munquad Ali, who had taken charge of this position in August 2019. Ali had replaced RS Kushwaha, who was the state party chief since May 2018. Kushwaha, who joined the Samajwadi Party last year, had contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as a BSP candidate from Salempur but lost the election to BJP’s Ravindra Kushwaha.
Seeking to ensure its “Dalit-Yadav-Muslim” equation in the Lok Sabha after winning 10 seats in the 2019 general elections, Mayawati had nominated Nagina MP and Dalit candidate Girish Chandra as its leader in the House, Jaunpur MP Shyam Singh Yadav as the deputy leader and Amroha MP Danish Ali as the party’s chief whip. But just before the opening session, Chandra was replaced with Ali as the floor leader. On August 7, 2019, Ali too had to step down giving way to Shyam Singh Yadav. Mayawati had then said that the rapid reshuffle was done to reach out to all communities and create a balance in “sarvasamaj”. Munquad Ali was then made the UP party president.
The BSP had then said, “After appointing Munquad Ali as the state chief, the party, following the principle of social engineering, has decided to nominate backward class leader Shyam Singh Yadav as the leader of the party in the Lok Sabha in place of Danish Ali.”
On November 6, 2019, ahead of the winter session of Parliament, Mayawati again did a flip-flop and reappointed Danish as the BSP Lok Sabha leader, handing his predecessor Shyam Yadav the organisational responsibility of the party’s UP unit. But two months later, Danish was replaced by Ritesh Pande , a Brahmin, who in turn was replaced by Girish Chandra in March this year after the BSP was routed in the UP Assembly polls.
Commenting on the frequent party rejigs, a senior BSP leader said, “Dalits, Muslims and the most backward class were the vote base and strength of the BSP in its initial years, and party founder Kanshiram had groomed leaders from these castes and communities. But the party later experimented with the social engineering formula of uniting Brahmins and Dalits, which worked in its favour during the 2007 UP Assembly elections. Of the 51 Brahmin candidates that the party had then fielded, at least 20 won.”
But the winning combination failed to bring returns for the party in subsequent elections: In the 2012 Assembly elections, only seven of the 51 Brahmin candidates were elected; in the 2017 polls, the party gave tickets to 52 Brahmin candidates of whom only four won.
Since the 2012 polls, the BSP has also witnessed a gradual erosion of its Muslim vote base. In the 2007 polls, the party had given tickets to 61 Muslim candidates, 29 of whom were elected. But in 2012, of 84 Muslim candidates fielded by the party, only 15 won. To dent the SP-Congress alliance in 2017, the BSP gave tickets to 100 Muslim candidates, but only five candidates won. In the 2022 polls, the BSP managed to win just one seat in the UP Assembly.
“The party has realised that its social engineering efforts and reaching out to ‘sarvasamaj’ has deterred voters belonging to the most backward class as well as the Muslims. It is now working to return to the Dalit-Muslim-MBC formula. This is why Vishwanath Pal has been appointed as the state president. He belongs to the ‘gadariya’ community that has presence in central and eastern UP,” a BSP leader said, pointing out that during the time of Kanshiram, the party had formidable leaders from the MBC communities such as Dayaram Pal and Narendra Kashyap.
Dayaram Pal, who had been the BSP state president earlier, is now with the SP, while Kashyap, a former BSP state chief and MP, is currently the OBC welfare department minister in the BJP-led UP government.
BSP spokesperson Dharamveer Chaudhary said, “Party president Mayawati believes in giving opportunity to every section of society. BSP follows the slogan of jaati todo, samaj jodo. This is the reason why the party appointed Vishwanath Pal as the new state president and promoted Bhim Rajbhar as Bihar coordinator.”
