In its pursuit to woo Brahmin voters, the BSP office bearers will now go from village to village and run a campaign to touch the feet of Brahmins. According to an Amar Ujala report, in a meeting held at a guest house in Bilhaur constituency, Kamlesh Chandra Diwakar said, that on the orders of the BSP National Secretary General, Satish Mishra, the party’s office-bearers will carry out feet touching campaign in Brahmin majority areas.
Soon the blue print of the campaign will be prepared. In order to make social engineering successful, a special wing will be established which will make sure that the members of Dalit community take the blessings of the Brahmins.
President of the Brahmin Brotherhood, Bablu Agnihotri along with Vikas Dubey, Sitaram Bajpai, Neeraj Mishra said that senior Brahmins of many villages have expressed their desire to conduct Yajna, if Mayawati becomes CM then a grand Yajna will be followed by a grand feast for exclusively for Brahmins will be organized in Shivrajpur’s Bairi ground. Subhash Aghihotri, Dinesh Pandey, Sanju Mishra, Sushil Tiwari, Anurag Dubey, Ravi Prakash, Shibbo Tripathi were present at the meeting.
Ostensibly, the purpose of this is to raise awareness about social engineering of the BSP but this gesture shows that BSP which was once a staunch anti-Brahmin party has come around. This step reeks of desperation on the part of Mayawati and BSP. She is desperate to come to power, and for that she needs support of all communities. Now, she cannot solely rely only on Dalit voters for her victory, and she is not the only Dalit leader in the state. New Dalit leaders like Chandrashekhar have also emerged in the state. Recently, BSP’s vice-president and national coordinator, Jai Prakash Singh also joined the Bhim Army.
The BJP has already made a significant dent in her Dalit vote bank by bringing non-Jatav Dalit voters in its fold in UP in 2017 state assembly elections. It won 69 of the state’s 85 reserved seats. Rahul Pandita in his article titled ‘Which way will Behen ji go?’ writes, “Mayawati lost a portion of her Dalit voters—16 per cent from her own Jatav caste and 35 per cent other Dalit voters in 2014 as compared to 2009, according to data put out by National Election Studies. “ She also lost 4 percent Brahimn voters and 14 percent Kurmis/Koeris voters. This recent strategy of BSP to woo Brahmin voters is just an extension of BSP’s Sarvajan strategy. The BSP’s mobilizational/electoral strategies have evolved a lot. In the 1990s, the party started giving tickets to backward castes also in order to widen its social base. After the mid-2000s, the party religiously employed Sarvajan strategy; it started directly mobilizing Brahmins, Upper castes, Muslims and most backward castes to vote for the BSP. The strategy paid off and the party came to power in 2007 state assembly elections.
Once in power, Mayawati began working on an inclusive agenda covering the needs of all social groups instead of solely giving special treatment to Dalits, as it used to earlier. Since the party captured the power on its own for the first time that too after years of struggle, Dalits expected that they would be given priority. But the Mayawati had some other plans which created anger among Dalits against her. In fact, satisfying the demands of all the castes became difficult for Mayawati to fulfill. Subsequently, it resulted in Mayawati’s shellacking in 2014 general elections and the BSP continued with its horrible performance in 2017 UP state assembly elections as well.
Upcoming general elections and the next UP state assembly elections would be the for Mayawati to keep herself and her party politically relevant and for doing that she would leave no stone unturned. This recent strategy of the BSP to woo Brahmin voters in an assembly constituency of UP is a testimony of this fact. She entered into an alliance with its principal rival- SP- all to stay politically relevant.