Emerging from the depths of a caste-ridden society, Mayawati, the four-time Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous State, embodied the aspirations of millions of Dalits. Her meteoric rise defied the tumultuous history of India’s political landscape, where power was predominantly held by the upper caste and class. Her journey attested to her determination and resilience.
Born into a humble family in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, she rebelled against social norms to pursue higher education. Her entry into politics, with the blessings of Dalit icon Kanshi Ram, was driven by a deep-seated desire to uplift her community and challenge the entrenched caste hierarchy. Leading the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a party representing the marginalised and oppressed, Mayawati’s ascent to power was nothing short of remarkable. P.V. Narasimha Rao famously called it a “miracle of democracy”. In 1995, she became Uttar Pradesh’s youngest Chief Minister and first Dalit CM, shattering glass ceilings and inspiring millions of Dalits nationwide. Her populist policies, including the construction of parks, statues, and memorials dedicated to Dalit icons, resonated with her core constituency, earning her the moniker ‘Behenji’ (respectable sister).
However, the Mayawati miracle began to unravel soon. Her reign was marred by a series of controversies. Critics accused her of rampant corruption, extravagance, and autocratic rule. Lavish spending on personal projects, including life-size statues of herself, brought her the ire of independent media as well as the public. Her swift shifts in allegiance and pursuit of new alliances were labelled political opportunism, even by her closest supporters.
As expected, Mayawati’s political fortunes slowly dwindled. Her party’s performance in subsequent elections declined, and her once-loyal supporters grew disillusioned. The BSP’s grip on power in Uttar Pradesh weakened, relegating Mayawati to the margins of politics. Once touted as a potential Prime Minister, her fall from grace serves as a poignant reminder of the fragility of power and the fickle nature of public adulation.
Today, Mayawati’s decline mirrors the solitude of Márquez’s patriarch. In her case, the solitude is not just personal but political, as her party struggles to find its earlier momentum. The charismatic and once-adulated leader has found herself increasingly isolated.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati’s decision to expel her nephew Akash Anand — a day after she removed him from the position of national coordinator for the second time in 10 months — draws attention to a beleaguered party. The BSP’s continuing internal disarray, combined with its unchecked electoral decline, has dulled the lustre of a party that once held out a radical promise of representation and empowerment of the most marginalised. Its failure is writ large in times when the question of “social justice”, riding on renewed demands for a caste census, has resurfaced. Mayawati’s party has neither been able to frame a fresh narrative of inclusive politics — as it once did through its social engineering experiments, be it the bhaichara sammelans or the shift from bahujan to sarvajan in its slogans and rhetoric — nor has it been able to adequately step up to the challenges of an intensifying political competition, or adapt to the needs of politics in the social media age.
The BSP has been challenged by the BJP’s purposeful and organised outreach to non-Jatav and Jatav Dalits, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan’s energetic claims on Kanshi Ram’s legacy, and SP’s politics of pichda, Dalit and alpasankhyak (PDA). But it has been more debilitated by its weaknesses and hesitations. The party’s inability to put together larger coalitions, for instance, a strategy that delivered for it in the past, has taken a toll. Kanshi Ram’s politics showed a recognition of why Ambedkar called political power the gurukul or master key. But that could only be achieved by agile politics, and the framing of new electoral strategies, that, for now, seem to have gone missing from the BSP’s repertoire.
