Mayawati has anointed her nephew Akash Anand as her political successor to help expand the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) beyond its home turf of Uttar Pradesh. Tech-savvy Anand is a management graduate.

Like Chirag Paswan, the son of Ram Vilas Paswan, Anand has risen to the top of his party but faces challenges carrying forward the legacy he has been handed. While Paswan in Bihar and Anand in Uttar Pradesh have assumed the leadership of their respective parties, the question remains if they will be able to keep Dalit communities united in contemporary politics, particularly in the Hindi heartland.

The BSP emerged as the most potent vehicle of the Dalit movement in Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s. The credit goes to Kanshi Ram for binding the communities into a distinctly robust political force in the maze of the Hindutva, centrist, and socialist forces in India's most populous state.

Under Kanshi Ram’s stewardship, the BSP in alliance with the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav trumped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1993 within a year of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992. The SP-BSP alliance didn’t last that long. The BSP withdrew its support to the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in 1995, but the BSP’s support base surged in India's most populous state.

Also read: Neither Here Nor There: Why Mayawati Is Losing Relevance in the Heartland

In 2001, Kanshi Ram nominated Mayawati as his successor. "Behenji", as she is referred to fondly by her cadre, did reasonably well expanding the support base of the party, which won the 2007 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh on its own. She completed her full five-year tenure as the chief minister.

But, probably, it was in this period that Mayawati drifted away from the path of her mentor and the most profound icon of the Dalit movement in post-independent India, Kanshi Ram. He had selected Mayawati – the talented daughter of a post office employee from the Jatav caste, Prabhu Das – and groomed her for a leadership role in the Dalit movement that he had built.

Kanshi Ram had the acumen to build the second rung of leadership in his lifetime. Apart from catapulting Mayawati into the vanguard of the BSP’s leadership, Ram also incubated Sone Lal Patel, R.K. Choudhary, Om Prakash Rajbhar, Sanjay Nishad, and several others to make the BSP a vehicle of ‘collective leadership’.

However, unlike Kanshi Ram, Mayawati never allowed the second-rung leaders to grow, and in the process, she slowly but steadily alienated several Dalit communities. Prominent leaders who enjoyed their space in the party during the period of Kanshi Ram either left the party or were expelled by Mayawati. Over the years, Mayawati’s support base shrunk to the Jatav caste.

During the 2022 assembly elections, when Om Prakash Rajbhar was in alliance with the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav, he openly alleged that Mayawati only patronised the Jatavs in the BSP; others had no place in it.

In a way, Mayawati adopted the "traits" of what she described as the "Manuvadi forces", by acting undemocratically and suppressing the voices of dissent in her party. She acted in a manner that she was perceived to be opposed to the Congress party and SP and supportive of the BJP. As a result, she also alienated the Muslim community, apart from the non-Jatav Dalit communities.

Her party's vote share has continuously plummeted from 2012 onwards. BSP secured 19.3% votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, when it contested in an alliance with the SP. That declined to 12.88% in the 2022 assembly elections, when the BSP contested alone but was perceived to have “helped” the BJP by pitting Muslim candidates against the SP's candidates.

Moreover, exploiting the cracks in the BSP, the BJP – equipped with a better organisation at the grassroots level and armed with welfare schemes for the poor – co-opted several former BSP leaders and made inroads into the Balmiki and other non-Jatav Dalit votes in the heartland state.

Akash Anand

Akash Anand made his political debut at a BSP rally in 2017. With the ‘blessings’ of Mayawati, he managed the BSP’s campaign in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He also undertook a 13-kilometre ‘Swabhiman Yatra’ through various Dalit settlements on the birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar in Rajasthan recently.

To be fair to him, he is young, energetic, educated, and poised to connect with the new generation of Dalit voters. But Chandra Shekhar Aazad is emerging as a new leader of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Only time will tell if Anand can carry forward the legacy of the Dalit movement. The BJP, SP, and Congress may want to share the "spoils" of the enervating Dalit movement in Uttar Pradesh.

Chirag Paswan

The political style of Ram Vilas Paswan was completely different from that of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. A product of the Ram Manohar Lohia-led socialist movement, Ram Vilas kept the battle for the Dalits’ cause within the ambit of the socialist movement. For large parts of his career, he remained in the Lok Dal, Janata Party, and Janata Dal, though he had formed the ‘Dalit Sena’ to espouse the causes of the Dalits.

Unlike in Uttar Pradesh, where Kanshi Ram had created a ‘monolith’ by uniting various Dalit castes, Bihar’s Dalits stayed divided among various socialist and communist parties. The Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Janata Dal (United), and the CPI-ML-Liberation all have voter bases in Dalit communities. Of course, Ram Vilas emerged as the strongest leader of the Paswan caste – the largest Dalit caste, which accounts for 5.31% of Bihar's population. The Ravidasis, who are equivalent to the Jatavs in UP, are fewer in number compared to Paswans, accounting for 5.21% population of the state population. Paswan was for members of his caste what Lalu Prasad Yadav is for the Yadavs.

He used his support base with panache, aligning with other parties according to his suitability during elections but maintaining a vice-like grip over the community. He never allowed the BJP or other parties to make inroads into his base.

Ram Vilas never shied away from promoting his family members in politics. He promoted his brothers, Pashupati Paras, a Union minister in the Narendra Modi government, and Ramchandra Paswan. There was no issue in his party when he got his son Chirag to contest the Jamui Lok Sabha seat for the first time in the 2014 elections.

However, his Lok Janshakti Party has split into two with Chirag and his uncle Pashupati locked in a turf war for the Paswans. Both Chirag and Pashupati are with the BJP, as of now, but there is still infighting. Who will inherit Ram Vilas’s legacy? Will it be Pashupati or Chirag? Or will the Paswans be divided among various parties? The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls might give some answers.

Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, author, media educator, and independent researcher in folklore.

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