After the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) dismal show in the recent Lok Sabha elections, party president Mayawati on Sunday announced her nephew Akash Anand as her successor and appointed him as the party’s national coordinator, reversing her previous decision.
“The BSP president Mayawati Ji once again given Akash Anand a chance to work in the party with full maturity. He will continue to hold all his posts in the party as before. That is, he will remain Mayawati’s only successor along with being the party’s national coordinator,” the statement from the BSP reads, after a meeting of national office-bearers to review the 2024 Lok Sabha verdict.
The decision made weeks after the Parliament elections verdict in which the BSP, a Dalit-centric party polled only 9.39% votes, its lowest in three decades and failed to win even a single seat, is seen as an attempt to project Mr. Anand, a 28-year-old as the future BSP face amid a new challenger and Nagina MP Chandra Shekhar Aazad trying to make deeper inroads among the younger generation of Dalit voters and able to achieve success evident from the parliamentary poll result in Nagina. In the recent election, Mr. Aazad, president of the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), won from Nagina, a Scheduled Caste reserved constituency in western Uttar Pradesh having sizeable Dalit electorate, by over 1,50,000 votes in a highly charged election defeating his nearest rival Om Kumar of the BJP. BSP candidate Surendra Pal Singh polled only 13,272 votes in Nagina despite a focused campaign by the Dalit-centric party, trying hard to stop Mr. Aazad. All the five Assembly segments coming under the Nagina parliamentary segment are part of Bijnor district. Ms. Mayawati, who served four times as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, also won from the Bijnor Lok Sabha seat in 1989, making her first parliamentary debut.
Continuous demands
Ms. Mayawati’s decision comes after continuous demands raised by the Dalit-centric party’s supporters for giving key responsibility to Mr. Anand amid Hashtag AkashAnand among top trending on X (formerly Twitter) on June 8 and 9. Mr. Anand, who was removed from the same position of national coordinator and heir apparent of Ms. Mayawati on May 7, 2024, at the peak of the Lok Sabha campaign, months after being declared in December 2023, faces a resurgent ASP leader Mr. Aazad.
Mr. Aazad, who is fresh from the Nagina Lok Sabha victory, is planning to fight the bypolls to 10 Assembly seats and strengthening his organisation, eyeing to capitalise on the BSP’s eroding electoral base, and particularly the younger generation of Dalits. “Both leaders will be eyeing the Dalit youths, who seemed to be looking for options. The BSP’s decision is totally aimed at countering Chandra Shekhar Aazad,” said Asad Rizvi, a political commentator based in Lucknow. In nutshell, the stage is set for a battle between two young Dalit leaders over reclaiming the Dalit leadership in Uttar Pradesh.
Ms. Mayawati-led party which remained a key political player in the electoral horizon of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous State, forming government on its own in the 2007 Vidhan Sabha polls by winning 206 out of 403 Assembly seats, witnessed a sharp decline in the last decade. In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the BSP polled 27.42% votes winning 20 seats, while in 2024 its vote share dipped by two-third to 9.39%, with more than 70 out of its 80 candidates failing to save deposits.
