BAHUJAN Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Kanshi Ram appears to be hellbent on a one-point agenda on the eve of the crucial Uttar Pradesh elections: to marginalise Mulayam Singh Yadav. And it is towards this end that he is taking one political gamble after another. First, he tied up with the Congress—in spite of his repeated criticism of Mahatma Gandhi and Congress members being Manuvadis—to fight the elections; and, now he wants to extend the Uttar Pradesh experiment to the national level.
Launching the BSP's election campaign at the Begum Hazrat Park rally in Lucknow on July 30, Kanshi said the BSP-Congress alliance "would together form the government even at the Centre". Driven by his obsession to oust Mulayam and his Samajwadi Party (SP), even at the cost of facing defeat at the hands of the BJP, Kanshi said: "The Congress has now become the number two Manuvadi party...the BJP is number one. As for Mula-yam, he is a goonda. So I find the Congress preferable to either the BJP or the SP."
All this talk about a national alliance is fine but the BSP is bound to face problems if the deal is actually formalised as the party does not have a substantial presence outside Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. For the moment, Kanshi has managed support from Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh—who is banking on 11 BSP legislators if the Arjun Singh and Madhavrao Scindia loyalists pull out from the Congress Government in his state and threaten his survival.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP played the catalyst in blowing all possibilities of the SP and BSP ever coming together on poll-eve. By making public the one-year-old Ramesh Chandra Committee report, holding Mula-yam and his supporters responsible for the June '95 attack on Mayawati, the BJP further widened the schism between the SP and the BSP. The fallout is a likely triangular contest in most constituencies, something that suits the BJP the most.
The last thing the Congress needed to make its presence felt in Uttar Pradesh—after a particularly bad stint in the recent Lok Sabha polls (it managed only 8 per cent votes)—was an alliance with the BSP. For the BSP, however, it is quite a different story. By tying up with the Congress, it now has a major political party accepting it as an elder partner, giving the BSP an opportunity to establish itself as a national party in just 12 years.
But the alliance has enough potential to damage the BSP's growth as a powerful social movement—to the cadres, at least, Kanshi has left room for criticism by joining hands with 'Brahminical forces', or a 'Manuvadi party'. The BSP has indeed deviated from B.R. Ambedkar's ideology—he had fought to bring Dalits and non-Brahmins together.
Ideology seemed to be farthest from Kanshi's mind, however, when, in the presence of about 100 senior state Congress leaders who were special invitees at the BSP's election rally, he told a largely Dalit gathering: "You ensure that at least 80 Congress candidates, in addition to the 28 members they had in the previous assembly, win the election this time. You vote for them because I want you to." The signal that he was sending was that the Dalits were his blind supporters and that he could shift their votes to the party of his choice. Under the seat-sharing arrangement, the BSP will contest 300 seats, leaving the remaining 125 seats in the 425-member assembly to the Congress.
"The BSP presence is everywhere. We are 85 per cent in terms of strength of the electorate," adds Kanshi. And all that the BSP is concentrating on at the moment is to ensure a high Dalit turnout. "Last time we got only 20.6 per cent of the votes. But this time, we have to take it to 41 per cent to get an absolute majority". To that end, the BSP has also set up the Bahujan Volunteers Force to "resist booth-capturing" and encourage voting.
And like its compromise with the Congress, the BSP has also been trying to strike a friendly chord with upper castes and intends to open its door to them—selectively. Many banners which were prominently displayed at the Lucknow rally were of upper-caste leaders. But this is clearly an electoral tactic—in the party's divisional committees, there is not one upper caste representative. Intent on eating into Mulayam's support base, the BSP wants to give about 25 per cent of the tickets to Muslims. Also, to give a pro-farmer image to its political campaign, the BSP has coined a slogan—" Jo jameen sarkari hain, woh jameen hamari hai "(All government land belongs to Dalits). This, when Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda has declared that the United Front Government will initiate major land reforms.
While the BSP's rise, in terms of electoral support, has been phenomenal—from a mere 2.4 per cent in 1985 when it first contested elections to 20.6 per cent in 1996—the party leadership is growing increasingly unpopular. The fortified 13, Mal Avenue residence of Mayawati—where Kanshi also stays when he visits Lucknow—was out of bounds for supporters who had come for the rally. Dalits, no doubt, have got a voice in Kanshi—despite all these irritants—but his latest tie-up, as per his own admission, seems inadequate to implement his pledge. "Mulayam says he will expose Atal Behari Vajpayee, and I will expose Mulayam". But exposing Mulayam, surely, will not give a new direction to the Dalit movement.
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