BSP Chief Mayawati's spontaneous resignation from Rajya Sabha for not being allowed to speak on ‘Saharanpur incident’ for as long as she wished is believed to be a well thought out strategy. Political analysts believe that this is not an ‘impulsive’ decision but that behind this move is her effort to ‘hold on’ to the dalit vote bank.
Mayawati has been an important political player in Uttar Pradesh politics. She climbed to the top on the power of the dalit and backward class votes. She has always raked up issues pertaining to them. She had got 206 seats in 2007 and had ruled the state. But later, her grip over the vote bank started weakening. In the 2012 assembly polls, it reduced to 80 seats. Her attempts to project herself as the crusader of dalits did not work in 2014. In the Lok Sabha polls, her party could not even win a single seat in Uttar Pradesh that year.
Despite fielding dalit and backward candidates in large numbers, her traditional vote bank gave her only 19 seats, out of the 403 in the UP assembly polls, in 2017. For the past six years, BSP’s political graph has been falling in terms of number of seats won.
Many of her confidants, Babu Singh Kushwaha, Brijesh Pathak, Swami Prasad Maurya, R.K. Chaudhary and Naseemuddin Siddiqui, have either left her or were expelled from the party.
During the Saharanpur riots, the initial dalit protests were led by local leaders who commanded and controlled the dalit rage. It did not need her presence. This has led her belief that her ‘hegemony’ is weakening among dalits.
Her resignation is a cleverly played move to garner the sympathy of her old vote bank. It is quite unlikely that her resignation will be accepted. Moreover, her tenure in Rajya Sabha is set end in April 2018, so she would not be a ‘big’ looser in the game.
