The BJP, which is enjoying the best phase of its 37-year-life at the moment, is working hard to eclipse each and every Opposition leader to ensure that its stay in power remains unchallenged for long. The recent development in Bihar played out perfectly in favour of the saffron party as the grand alliance fell and both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad were neutralised. The party is now aiming to topple two strong non-BJP leaders – West Bengal's Mamata Banerjee and Odisha's Naveen Patnaik. In Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa's death has made its work easier while the implosion in the Samajwadi Party in UP has also rendered a powerful leader like Mulayam Singh Yadav ineffective.
However, there is another non-BJP leader who many thought could have turned into an important pillar of the anti-Modi alliance, is also set to face major challenges. And guess what? The BJP has to do little in pulling this leader down for the task has been taken up by those who were once in her own party. Yes, we are talking about Mayawati.
On Monday, August 7, several outfits of Dalits, OBCs and Muslims (16 of them to be precise) led by former leaders of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) held a meeting in Delhi on Sunday, August 6, to come up with a strategy to knock out the former chief minister of UP and jeopardise her "Bahujan" vote-bank.
These outfits were brought together by the BSP supremo's former aide Naseemuddin Siddique and they formed a National Bahujan Alliance along with a coordination committee with former BSP MP Pramod Kuree. Kureel even said that he is still in the BSP and wanted to see the end of Mayawati as its leader, an Indian Express report added.
Mayawati under threat from her core support base
This is quite significant a development. Mayawati, who had once innovated the political strategy of stitching together a Bahujan or rainbow coalition of Dalits, Brahmins and also a section of Muslims which delivered in elections, is now under threat from her core support base. She herself has resigned from the Rajya Sabha while her party has no presence in Lok Sabha and an alarmingly reduced stature in the state Assembly. On the top of it, her act of expelling Siddique after the BSP was routed in the UP elections earlier this year has also increased the possibility of a backlash.
It has been reported that the BJP was in touch with Siddique and his camp though they had reservations against joining the former. The BJP, which has already taken a sweet revenge against Mayawati, who had bypassed the BJP to strike a deal with the Brahmins to sweep the 2007 state polls, by routing it not once but twice (2014 general polls and 2017 state polls), will not complain even if Siddique doesn't join its ranks and does everything alone to end Mayawati's run.
Mayawati's rainbow coalition is turning black & white
Mayawati's rise was once equated with that of the Dalits but in the subsequent days, her agenda was driven completely by the quest for power. The innovative strategies of combining the socially incompatible groups did pay off but not permanently. Today, the Brahmins are leaving her because she couldn't accommodate them in a primarily Dalit party. And then people like Siddique are doing their best to push the Muslims away from the BSP supremo.
In May, following his expulsion from the party, he had claimed that Mayawati had called the Muslim community "traitor" after seeking an explanation from him as to why did it not vote for her party. And then there are the ultra-smart political strategy masters like PM Modi and his general Amit Shah who have jeopardised Mayawati's electoral prospects in her core support group: Dalits.
Mayawati's blind pursuit of power left her isolated
Mayawati's blind pursuit of power eventually alienated her from her core ideology and she was alienated from the ground reality. The leader became so obsessed with the possibility of becoming the prime minister (she even started addressing rallies in as far as northeast to establish a pan-Indian appeal) that she lost it all. The end result has been her own loss of face and her party's rapid decline. The outcome of the UP elections this year was a sort of final nail in her coffin and now, dissident quarters aim to bury her.
Mayawati also made a blunder by expelling people at will. Today, the number of leaders expelled by her has become quite a substantial one and they now have their opportunity to hit back at Mayawati, understanding fully well that the elephant is crippled.
If the new platform succeeds in ousting Mayawati, it will create an entirely new possibility over the Dalit vote-bank, especially ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections. The BSP supremo has been the most potent force since the 1990s to capitalise on this and her decline would lead to a vacuum which many will aim to fill in. It looks the BJP stands to gain the maximum from the fall of Mayawati for its dynamic leadership has all the skills to gobble up those who are trying to assert themselves as the real alternative for the Dalit messiah of modern India.
