By Sharat Pradhan, IANS
Lucknow : The rout of the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Brahmin nominee against the Samajwadi Party rival in the Ballia Lok Sabha by-poll has given a severe jolt to the much hyped “social engineering” that put BSP chief Mayawati in power in India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh last year.
Brahmins, who live in large numbers in Uttar Pradesh compared to other states, gave Mayawati’s essentially Dalit outfit a boost in the May 2006 assembly elections, helping the BSP to ride to power on its own strength.
BSP’s three earlier stints in power had come with support from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Mayawati had handpicked Vinay Shankar Tiwari as her party nominee to challenge Samajwadi Party supported Neeraj Shekhar on what was regarded as a pocket borough of the latter’s father, former prime minister Chandra Shekhar.
Being the son of eastern Uttar Pradesh mafia don-turned-politician and party hopper Hari Shankar Tiwari, the BSP candidate was seen by Mayawati as a potential winner.
Her party’s Brahmin mascot and confidant Satish Misra had been confident about Tiwari’s chances.
“You will see how we wrest the seat from the Chandra Shekhar family. Haven’t you seen what the combined Dalit-Brahmin strength was capable of doing?” was Misra’s assertion barely a few weeks before electioneering commenced in Ballia.
Not Misra alone, but almost all top rung BSP leaders, and more particularly Mayawati’s Brahmin ministers, literally camped in Ballia for almost a month. They went door-to-door to every Brahmin household and made them swear by their “janeu” (holy thread) to vote for the party’s Brahmin nominee.
The election had become a prestige issue for Vinay Shankar Tiwari’s father Hari Shankar too. The Gorakhpur-based senior Tiwari – whose name still spells fear in large parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh – had anointed his son as heir apparent for his extra-constitutional legacy. And political position was regarded as a major asset to legitimise the family’s wealth and clout.
But his defeat by a whopping margin of 131,000 votes has dealt a blow not only to the designs of the Tiwari family but also to Mayawati.
Mayawati is still unwilling to see the defeat as a blow to her social engineering. After all, it is on the strength of this Dalit-Brahmin axis that she hopes to rule India one day.
The chief minister attributed the Ballia defeat to “domination by feudal forces” despite the fact that her party had won three of the five assembly seats in the district barely seven months back.
“Where were the feudal forces then?” asked former minister Ambika Chaudhary, a prominent leader of the Samajwadi Party, which bagged two of the five Ballia assembly seats then.
Mayawati also blames the defeat on a “tacit understanding between Samajwadi Party and BJP”.
In a statement issued here, she said: “The BJP nominee polled a paltry 22,723 votes this time, as against 100,009 votes in the 2004 Lok Sabha election, which clearly goes to show that BJP got its votes transferred to the Samajwadi Party.”
The release went on to assert: “BSP will continue to pursue its mission to weaken casteist, feudal and communal forces by pushing its ‘sarvasamaj -bhaichara’ (harmony between all castes) agenda, not just in Uttar Pradesh but right across the country.”