The Mayawati Mystery

UTTAR PRADESH

- Prashant Srivastava and Ashish Misra

Has anyone seen Behenji? One of the abiding mysteries of the 2022 assembly election in Uttar Pradesh was the absence of the Bahujan Samaj Party supremo in what was her party’s most dismal performance to date. Umashankar Singh won the sole seat for the party, in Rasra, Ballia district. Even the Congress did one seat better, as did smaller parties like the Apna Dal (S), Rashtriya Lok Dal, Nishad Party and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party. The BSP’s vote share was its lowest since 1993, a mere 12.9 per cent. It’s hard to believe that this is the same party which formed a government with a full majority just 15 years back, in 2007.

Nowhere was this decline more manifest than in its erstwhile stronghold Ambedkar Nagar, which Mayawati carved out of Faizabad district in 1995. The party lost all five seats here, for the first time ever. Two of its MLAs—Ram Achal Rajbhar from Akbarpur and Lalji Verma from Katehri—as well as ex-MP Rakesh Pandey, father of current Jalalpur MP Ritesh Pandey, had left for the Samajwadi Party on the eve of the 2022 assembly election. Ritesh, a former MLA from Jalalpur, won the 2019 Lok Sabha poll, and in the ensuing bypoll, BSP lost the seat to SP. Verma, a former leader of the BSP Legislature Party, minces no words. “Mayawati has shunned the ideals of BSP founder Kanshi Ram,” he says. “She is now indirectly helping the BJP. It made the people of Ambedkar Nagar angry.” Now, it seems, they have spoken.