The Rise of Akhilesh Yadav as the Leader of the Bahujan Samaj

New Delhi: Over the last decade, especially in the last six years, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav has evolved from a development-oriented administrator who was reluctant to embrace established caste politics to a pragmatic politician aspiring to be the leader of the ‘Bahujan Samaj’.

Over this period, not only has Akhilesh attempted to build a new social coalition under the slogan of PDA (Pichda Dalit Alpsankhyak) but he has also reclaimed his caste identity, not only as a Yadav but as a member of the larger OBC and ‘PDA family’. In other words, the Bahujan Samaj of marginalised Hindu castes and Muslims.

This evolution of Akhilesh’s political positioning, forced by successive defeats and partly due to the stagnation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), is at display in his campaign for the upcoming bypoll elections in Uttar Pradesh.

At a rally in Moradabad on November 11, Akhilesh linked two incidents of personal humiliation faced by him to the larger honour of the PDA. This was him unabashedly showcasing his OBC caste identity. He mentioned how after he lost power and vacated the official residence of the chief minister in Lucknow in 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cleansed the premises with Gangajal as an act of purification. A similar incident took place in May this year when BJP workers washed the premises of a temple in Kannauj after Akhilesh visited it to offer prayers during his election campaign.

The act of purification is an age-old casteist practice used to dehumanise the so-called ‘shudras’, the social bloc to which Akhilesh’s community historically belonged as per the Hindu caste hierarchy.

“This is the same government which had cleansed a temple after I visited it. They had also washed the chief minister’s residence with Gangajal after I vacated it. Tell me, can PDA people accept this,” asked Akhilesh, campaigning in Kundarki.

Further, he referred to the historical differences between the ‘upper caste’ and ‘lower caste’ Hindus.

“They are the same people who have been insulting [us] for thousands of years. They want to stay in power through their machinations. This fight is very old. They say we are casteist people. I ask them, what have they done to remove caste,” said Akhilesh.

He would have triggered outrage with his choice of words had he made these references a decade back when he had come to power in Uttar Pradesh. Back then, Akhilesh, still under the tutelage of his father, the late Mulayam Singh Yadav, was trying to carve out a fresh identity for himself with politics based on a clean image, infrastructural projects and welfare schemes.

But the first two years of his tenure were marred by incidents of communal violence, mishandling of law and order and indecisiveness. There were also multiple centres of power, restricting Akhilesh’s grip over the state’s affairs. The Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, just ahead of the 2014 general election, truly exposed the fragilities of the SP government.

Also read: UP Bypolls: SP vs BJP Contest is More About Political Messaging and Consolidation Than The Outcome

In this climate, the 2014 election proved to be a disaster as the SP managed to win only five seats, all of them by Akhilesh’s relatives. The defeat inspired him to embark on a new strategy to project himself as a leader who wanted to leave behind a mark through big-ticket development and investment projects. The 302-km Lucknow-Agra Expressway and the Lucknow Metro became symbols of the Akhilesh model, departing from the social justice politics advanced by his late father.

During this phase, Akhilesh tried to overcome the damages caused due to Hindu polarisation in 2014. Despite not having full control over the SP, he also worked to provide a new, clean look to his party, often accused by opponents and the upper caste-led media of having an undisciplined cadre and a poor law and order record.

In 2016, Akhilesh famously opposed the merger of Muslim strongman MLA from Purvanchal Mukhtar Ansari’s party with the SP, setting the stage for a larger conflict with his uncle Shivpal Yadav, who was more rooted in caste arithmetic.

Akhilesh overcame a long family feud, took control of the party from his father in a coup and contested the 2017 assembly election on the plank of development. Kaam Bolta Hain (work speaks for itself) was his rallying cry. The campaign showcased fancy highways where aircrafts could land, free laptops, future metro rail and a range of pension schemes.

During his time in power, Akhilesh displayed reluctance to publicly talk about caste as he attempted to wriggle out of the SP’s ‘Yadav-Muslim’ image. On the rare occasion he did use the word “backward” for himself, he always ensured he juxtaposed it with the “forward work” he was doing or had done.

With an SP government in disarray, the 2017 Uttar Pradesh election result was inevitable as the BJP used the anti-Muslim and anti-Yadav cards to mobilise voters of other Hindu communities through diligent management of OBC and Dalit aspirations. The defeat jolted the SP, now completely under Akhilesh’s control, but also forced him to rethink his politics if he intended to challenge the BJP’s almost insurmountable vote share of over 40%.

Akhilesh understood the value of strategic caste-based alliances and the need to build a bigger coalition, the model that the BJP had successfully used in 2014 and 2017. In 2019, in a conversation he told this reporter that he had learnt the formula from the BJP and wanted to make the saffron party pay with the same strategy. The first successful experiment came in 2018 when the SP won the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls with the support of the Nishad Party and the outside backing of the BSP.

Scalping these two high-profile seats set the stage for an alliance of the two parties (along with the Rashtriya Lok Dal) — the Mahagathbandhan. During the course of the campaign, Akhilesh countered Narendra Modi’s “chaiwala” gimmick by projecting himself as a “doodwala,” unapologetic about his Yadav background. The SP’s manifesto also promised an Ahir regiment in the army.

The alliance promised “Samajik Nyay se Mahaparivartan (An upheaval through social justice)”. However, the arithmetic was not enough to stop the BJP. Akhilesh, who had no option but to allow Mayawati to play the role of the senior partner in the alliance, came out deflated. His party won only five seats. The alliance collapsed soon after as Mayawati pulled the plug on it, blaming the lack of missionary zeal among the SP’s core Yadav voters for the failure of the alliance.

This is where the SP’s politics took a new turn. Although Akhilesh contested Mayawati’s assessment, he ensured that he did not do anything in public to antagonise her support base of Dalits especially Jatavs and Chamars. Instead, he started addressing the concerns and issues of Dalits and created his own support base among the community. For this, he gradually ransacked the BSP, poaching some of its most senior OBC Ambedkarite leaders such as Lalji Verma, Ram Achal Rajbhar and R.S. Kushwaha and senior Dalit leaders including Yogesh Verma, Inderjeet Saroj and Tribhubvan Dutt. These leaders were once considered trusted lieutenants of Mayawati.

Till 2018, B.R. Ambedkar did not feature in the SP’s election material. But with Akhilesh’s new focus on Dalits, he realised the emotional value Ambedkar had for the community. Ambedkar also provided Akhilesh a powerful icon to challenge the BJP’s upper-caste dominated worldview and bridge the gap between the SP and Dalits created by decades of political antagonism between the BSP and the SP. For the first time since the SP’s inception in 1992, a bust of Ambedkar was planted in the SP’s headquarters in Lucknow. Akhilesh also started a new front just to connect with Dalits, the Babasaheb Vahini. Gradually, Ambedkar started featuring in SP’s posters, banners and hoardings.

In the months leading up to the 2022 election, Akhilesh came up with a “colourful bouquet” of OBC-based parties. He formed alliances with five other parties, all of them with a support base among non-Yadav OBCs (Jats, Kurmi, Chauhan, Rajbhar and Maurya-Kushwaha). He openly espoused the cause of social justice and demanded a caste census. This also provided him the muscle to poach OBC leaders from the ruling BJP. Most important among them was Swami Prasad Maurya, an Ambedkarite and former leader of the Opposition, who quit his cabinet berth to switch over to the SP. Maurya’s rebellion and his clarion call of 85 versus 15 (Dalits, OBC and tribals versus the upper castes) was the SP’s much-needed response to Adityanath’s call for a ‘80 versus 20’ (Hindus versus Muslims) communal narrative. This crystallised into a situation where the BJP was confronted with allegations that it had shortchanged the numerically-significant backward caste voters, deprived them of jobs and diluted reservation.

If the setbacks in 2014 and 2017 compelled Akhilesh to abandon his obsession with an image-conscious approach and own his backward caste roots, in the 2022 election campaign he took the rhetoric a notch higher, promising a “revolution of the backwards.”

In one rally, he even said that only the ideologies of Ram Manohar Lohia and B. R Ambedkar could fulfill the dreams of the country and “our ancestors.”

An important element of the change in Akhilesh’s narrative has been the evocation of B.R. Ambedkar and speaking out against the threats to reservation and the constitution primarily due to increasing privatisation under the BJP rule. Akhilesh has consistently linked crony capitalism and privatisation to the dilution of reservations and shrinking government job space, which affect Dalits and OBCs. To increase his appeal, he also started unveiling statues of prominent OBC icons and promised to build memorials for them if he was voted to power. Once a leader who shied away from caste rhetoric, Akhilesh has also borrowed from and improvised the famous slogan by BSP founder and Bahujan politics ideologue Kanshiram, Jiski jitni sankhya bhari, uski utni hissedari (Greater the numbers, greater the representation).

Despite a spirited fight, the SP could not prevent the BJP from returning to power in 2022. But the results of his strategy were showing. Akhilesh bettered his position from 2017, increasing his seat tally from 47 to 111. Overall, the alliance led by him won 125 seats in the 403-member assembly. It’s true that the alliance built by him did not last long after the results as the smaller parties started deserting him for greener pastures offered by the ruling BJP, but Akhilesh did not abort the path he was on. Rather than reverting to his old style of trying to appease everyone, Akhilesh doubled-down on his strategy and reformulated it in the form of PDA.

In the 2024 election, Akhilesh did ally with Congress to show a united face of the INDIA bloc and to avoid confusion among the Muslim voters, but it was his strategy of PDA and meticulous ticket distribution that put the BJP on the defensive. The SP-led alliance fielded more OBC and Dalit candidates than the BJP, remarkably altering the caste game. The results testified to this strategy as the SP and Congress won 43 out of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, delivering a big blow to the Narendra Modi-led BJP.

Akhilesh’s strategy to provide larger representation to marginalised Hindu castes and linking their political aspirations with livelihood issues, also had an impact on the demography of the elected MPs. The SP’s performance led to a surge in the overall number of OBC MPs in the state, coming at the cost of upper caste Thakurs and Brahmins. Akhilesh has also increased the representation of OBCs and Dalits in the party organisation, making them more visible at events and public meetings.

The Opposition’s narrative of saving the constitution was spearheaded by Akhilesh through his slogan of “Samvidhan manthan” much before the BJP’s embarked on a misadventure with the slogan of “400 par”.

With the BSP losing popularity and direction, Akhilesh pounced on the opportunity to wean away its loyalist Dalit voters by promising to stand for the constitution and safeguard reservations. He gave this strategy an intense twist when he fielded senior Dalit MLA Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad and inductee from BSP Sunita Verma, also a Dalit, as the candidate from Meerut during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Verma lost by a thin margin but Prasad triumphed in Faizabad, where the Ram Mandir is situated. Prasad’s victory dealt a big blow to the BJP’s Hindutva card and stained its campaign to take electoral advantage of the Ram Mandir.

Akhilesh’s gambit of fielding Dalits on unreserved seats was met favourably by the Dalit political class. Buoyed by this, he has repeated the strategy again in the upcoming bypolls. The SP has fielded a Dalit from the urban seat of Ghaziabad. Given that Ghaziabad is considered a difficult seat for the SP to win, placing its bets on a Dalit from here was more about communicating with the larger Dalit consciousness and keeping the community engaged.

In his rally in Moradabad on November 11, Akhilesh declared that the fight to save the constitution was not over. In Karhal (Mainpuri), he accused the BJP of running an agenda to “hoodwink PDA people” and snatch from them reservations in jobs. In Aligarh, Akhilesh countered the BJP’s false theory of Muslim reservation in Aligarh Muslim University by asking about reservation to Dalits and OBCs in other universities. “They ask why there is no reservation in one university. I say why is there no reservation in all the universities in the country,” he asked.

Also read: UP Bypolls: SP and Congress Put Up a United Front, Build on PDA Strategy

Akhilesh’s PDA strategy does not outline a hard ideological position like the BSP did. And this could be one of its shortcomings, if not today, but later. The socialist background of the SP and the lack of compelling political literature do not allow the party to openly antagonise the dominant castes or run a narrative that can propagate both political change and social change.

Rather than training guns on the upper castes, the PDA strategy has focused on mobilising Muslims, Dalits and OBCs by putting the BJP under the crosshair.

The BJP, in Akhilesh’s imagination, is the personification of the upper castes. “They hate backward castes. They hate Dalits. They hate our tribal brothers and they hate our minority brothers,” Akhilesh said at a recent rally, targetting the saffron party.

After the 2024 election result, this reporter asked a senior Dalit leader and SP MP from Mohanlalganj, R.K. Chaudhary, if Akhilesh’s PDA strategy was an improvisation of Kanshiram’s Bahujan Samaj politics. Chaudhary worked extensively with Kanshiram and was one of the founding members of the BSP. He admitted that the ‘PDA’ was similar to the Bahujan politics of Kanshiram but with a small alteration. PDA is powered by Pichdas (OBCs) while Kanshiram’s Bahujan strategy was powered by Dalits (DPA rather than PDA, as Chaudhary put it).

Chaudhary, who in June created a stir after he demanded that the Sengol be removed from the parliament and be replaced by a copy of the constitution, also said that the change in Akhilesh’s politics had also resonated with BSP’s core voters, who were flocking to vote for it without asking anything in return.

Unlike Mayawati today, Akhilesh can boast of the trust of Muslims, as well as a fair share of Dalits and OBCs. The results in the bypoll election for nine seats in Uttar Pradesh are set to be a commentary on the battle of rhetorics between the BJP (batoge toh katoge or if you stand divided, you will be slaughtered) and the SP (judenge toh jeetenge or if we stick together we will win). No matter which way the results swing, what’s certain is that the campaign is another step forward for Akhilesh in his quest to claim the position of the leader of the Bahujan Samaj in the country’s most populous state.