Mayawati's Revolution

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has secured a majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly and has garnered as much as 51.2 per cent of the votes polled. It was way back in 1977 that there was such an emphatic victory when the winning party secured more than half the votes polled and, of course, it was last in 1991 that a single party won a majority in the vidhan sabha.

The phenomenal growth of the BSP over two decades – the party first made its mark in the UP assembly in 1989 – has its roots in the discrimination that the educated among the dalits in the region experienced in the social, educational and consequently economic spheres. Kanshi Ram’s idea of a dalit exclusivist political party could, however, succeed only in a definite political context; such a context was provided in 1979 when the Congress and Janata parties frustrated Jagjivan Ram’s attempts to become India’s first dalit prime minister. In UP, a consolidation of this collective consciousness into a political platform was facilitated by an unshackling of the large mass of landless agricultural workers (read dalits) when the rich peasantry took to mechanisation and simultaneously shifted to cultivation of sugar cane and other cash crops. The dalit labourers were no longer “tied” to agriculture and could find employment as “free labour” in the agro-industrial units that came up in the state. This was the context for the BSP’s consolidation in UP between 1989 and 1996. But because of the exclusivist agenda that the BSP adopted at that stage, it appeared that the party would be stuck with around 100 seats in the assembly. The 2002 polls conveyed a different message. With Mayawati leading the party, the BSP managed to secure 23.1 per cent of the votes, showing clearly that the party was now gathering electoral support from outside the dalit community. This was achieved partly by “selling” party nominations to influential men from among the upper castes, which certainly meant a total negation of any radical agenda of social transformation because those who managed to “buy” the BSP nominations were feudal satraps. The BSP did suffer from the presence of such opportunists because many of them were to later walk out of the party to prop up either the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Samajwadi Party.