With exit, Mayawati wants higher role

Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati’s drama-tic decision to resign from the Rajya Sabha was apparently in protest against the deputy chairman’s refusal to give her more time to speak on an issue concerning Dalits. That was the reason proffered by her. But her resignation from the House can only be considered as overreaction to the vice-chairman’s decision, however strongly she felt about it. A more sensible view would be that her decision was not just a disproportionate act of protest, but an attempt to assert her position as the most important Dalit leader of the country. A cynical view would be that she does not lose much by the resignation as she has only one year left of her term and the party does not have enough strength in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly to re-elect her. While this may be true, she has also tried to make the resignation a political statement.

Mayawati and the BSP are at a low point in politics, the lowest in many decades. Successive defeats in the Assembly elections in 2012 and 2017 in UP, which is the party’s main support base, and a poor performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha election have debilitated the party. The BSP had once ruled the state on its own and Mayawati has been chief minister four times. But the party has only 19 seats in the Assembly now and not a single MP in the Lok Sabha. It is considered to have lost some of its following to the BJP. Changes in electoral strategies also went against it. The BSP had to contend with the problem of negative images related to corruption and Mayawati’s method of management of the party’s internal affairs. At the same time, there are signs of the emergence of a new Dalit politics under younger leaders like Jignesh Mevani in Gujarat and Chandrasekhar in UP. A new party, Bhim Army, led by Chandrasekhar, is becoming popular in UP and elsewhere.

Therefore, Mayawati needed a dramatic action to come back into political focus and the resignation may have served the purpose. But that is not enough to recover the large political ground she has lost in recent years. The BSP needs to go back to the basics of political engagement, respond better to the changes taking place in her own constituency and review the tactics which have led the party to this pass. She is still the most visible face of Dalit politics. The BSP has over 20% vote share in UP and a considerable presence in many other states. A recovery is still possible but it calls for some new thinking, reconstruction and hard work.