Lucknow: The Assembly elections in UP in February are like the proverbial Manna from Heaven for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is waiting to mop up the spoils of infighting in the Samajwadi Party.
BSP president Mayawati’s new social engineering formula that forges a dalit-Muslim combine was evident on Tuesday when the party announced a maximum of 97 tickets to Muslims and 87 to dalits. In the 2007 and 2012 Assembly polls, the BSP banked on the dalit-brahmin alliance, which gave it a majority in 2007 but left the party with merely 80 seats in 2012.
The increased focus of the BSP on Muslims comes at a time when the SP — the main custodian of Muslim votes — is imploding due to factional wars.
The prevailing political situation in UP is expected to make the BSP emerge as a major beneficiary of the Muslim votes since the Congress is still not seen as a main challenger to the BJP.
A problem that Ms Mayawati may face in winning over Muslims is the fact that she formed government in UP in alliance with the BJP thrice.
She will require all her skills to assure Muslims that she will not form an alliance with the BJP again. If she is successful, her social engineering may again catapult her to the post of the CM for the fifth time.
The BSP also faces a problem of depletion in the dalit votes in some areas, where her senior leaders have quit the party in the past few months. Leaders like Swami Prasad Maurya, Jugal Kishore, R.K. Chaudhary, Daddu Prasad and half a dozen legislators have quit the party, damaging the BSP’s vote base in their areas. The BSP, however, is way ahead of other parties, when it comes to candidate selection. While some of her candidates were finalised almost six months ago, the others were given the green signal two months back. Ms Mayawati has always been critical of demonetisation and claimed that it has hit the common man and the downtrodden sections of society. Now she is all set to move ahead in the elections on the issue of demonetisation and the increased atrocities on dalits in the SP regime in the state and in other BJP-ruled states.
