SAD, BSP announce tie-up for Punjab Assembly polls; Mayawati's party on alliance spree since 2018

Poll-bound Punjab is 'destination next' on regional tie-ups for Mayawati's BSP, which on Saturday announced an alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) for next year's assembly elections in the Congress-ruled state.

Mayawati-led BSP will fight 20 of the 117 Assembly seats in Punjab, while the rest will be contested by SAD, the erstwhile ruling party of the state. SAD walked out of the BJP-led NDA alliance at the Centre last year in protest against the contentious farm laws.

The laws have kicked up a more than six months-long farmer protest on Delhi borders adjoining Punjab, UP (both states are going to polls next year) and Haryana. UP and Haryana are BJP-ruled and the ongoing protest could pose real problems for the saffron party in both states -- particularly since farmers there are most vocal against the new laws.

Making the announcement at a joint conference, BSP's Satish Chandra Mishra and SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal hailed it as a “new day, historic day and big turn in Punjab's politics”. Badal said both parties will jointly fight the 2022 polls and future elections together, a hint at the 2024 general elections. The SAD-BSP alliance had contested the 1996 Lok Sabha polls together and won 11 out of 13 seats in Punjab. It had broken up after the former allied with Congress.

With the past apparently in mind, both Mishra and Badal expressed confidence that their alliance will sweep the 2022 polls and oust the ruling Congress government from power.

However, a close look at BJP's alliances with regional parties in other states shows that the party has not been able to do much when it has been out of power in UP. Hence, SAD's high hopes may be misplaced; although, unlike other parties with which BSP allied in other states, SAD is a key player in Punjab politics. The BJP, in fact, was a junior ally, contesting from only 23 seats in the past.

The BSP had indicated its willingness to tie up with SAD way back in 2018, much before the SAD-BJP relations soured in 2020. BSP Punjab affairs in-charge Meghraj Singh had, in August 2018, said his party was open to ally with SAD if they broke ties with BJP.

In Punjab, Dalits constitute a huge 31 percent voting block and Punjab is the home state of Mayawati's mentor and anchor of new Dalit politics, Kanshi Ram. Knowing well the emotional connection of Kanshi Ram's name with Dalits, Badal also referred to the bond between SAD patriarch Parkash Singh Badal and BSP founder Late Ram Sharad.

This could spell some trouble for the ruling Congress in Punjab, which is already battling massive infighting between Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu.

Punjab, where the BSP reworked an alliance with SAD after a gap of 27 years, is the fifth state where the BSP has allied with regional parties. The string of alliances began with HD Devegowda's JDS in February 2018 in Karnataka, which has 20 percent Dalit electorate. It later tied up with Ajit Jogi’s Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) for 2018 Assembly polls and Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana for 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

While Mishra promised "this alliance will continue forever now", the fact remains that the BSP has continued its curious plank of instability to shore its own political fortunes.

BSP also understands that a tie-up with regional parties is more beneficial than any alliance with the national parties -- Congress or BJP, which it has been calling as "two sides of the same coin" and lambasting them as "Naagnath and Saanpanath" (both meaning the king of snakes).

BSP's alliance spree

In September 2018, Mayawati tied up with Ajit Jogi's party in Chhattisgarh, where Dalits constitute 16 percent of the voting population. Both parties failed to make a difference to the outcome and Congress romped home, bringing to end the 15-year uninterrupted rule of the BJP. SC/STs mainly backed Congress in the 2018 state polls. Six months later, BSP snapped ties with Jogi's party in Chhattisgarh.

BSP had tied up with HD Devegowda's Janata Dal (S) for Karnataka Assembly polls in 2018, which threw a hung verdict making JDS' H D Kumaraswami chief minister with outside support from Congress, an experiment that did not last long. But that was more due to the triangular nature of politics in the state, where JDS was an influential player. Mayawati's party could win only one seat in Kollegal, whereas it notched up only a few votes (total votes less than one percent) in 16 other constituencies where it contested.

In fact, the pre-poll tie-up in Karnataka was the first such alliance that the BSP had entered into with any party since the 1996 tie-up with the Congress in Uttar Pradesh.

Two months later, BSP and Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) announced their tie-up for both the 2019 assembly polls in Haryana as well as the Lok Sabha polls. Chautala’s son Abhay Singh was quick to proclaim that a non-BJP, non-Congress Third Front would be formed under the leadership of the BSP supremo. The calculation was since Dalits make up a fifth of Haryana’s population, Chautala's Jat, farmer base with Dalit votes could do wonders.

In the 2014 assembly elections there, the BSP had secured a vote share of 4.37 percent and won one seat. But the outcome of Lok Sabha polls left both BSP and INLD distraught, as the BJP won all 10 Lok Sabha seats. The BSP got 3.65 percent votes and INLD less than 2 percent. Clearly, the Jat-Dalit social engineering failed. Months later, both parties parted ways and contested Assembly polls separately, in which BSP got 4.21% and INLD got 2.44%.

In UP, the BSP had allied with all three parties -- BJP, Congress and SP -- in the past. The Congress and BSP entered into an electoral alliance in Uttar Pradesh in 1996. Soon, the BSP dumped the Grand Old Party and joined hands with the BJP to form a short-lived government. Earlier, it had tied up with Mualyam Singh Yadav's SP, which ended on a bitter note in June 1995 with the Lucknow Guest House incident.

In 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Mayawati again tied up with SP. The BSP won 10 and SP 5 seats, Soon after, Mayawati snapped ties, alleging the SP's votes did not get transferred to BSP.