BSP chief is playing victimhood card by quitting Rajya Sabha. It won’t work
If Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati believes that her dramatic resignation from the Rajya Sabha membership will help her to consolidate her hold on the Scheduled Caste community, then she is banking too much on one single act. In quitting the House, she declared that she was doing so because she was not allowed to speak her mind on issues relating to the welfare of her community — particularly on the supposed rise of violence against people of this group in Uttar Pradesh, now ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party. She accused the Chair and members of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha of sabotaging her speech. If Mayawati is indeed keen to retain her hold on the community, she must rework her political narrative; histrionics will not do any more. Although she had had occasions to rule Uttar Pradesh, she did little to improve the lot of the common citizen from the Scheduled Castes in terms of health, education, economic empowerment etc. All she did was to play on their fears and the history of persecution at the hands of upper caste members. At some point in time, she realised that she could not register electoral wins solely on the strength of her caste votes, and decided to craft a social rainbow. This worked for a while, but the hollowness soon became apparent and the other castes drifted away from her. More ominously for her, sections of the Scheduled Castes too have abandoned her. The 2014 lok Sabha election, where her party drew a blank, and the more recent Assembly election to the State, where the BSP finished a distant and poor third, are indicators of her loosening grip. It stands to reason, therefore, to assume that her resignation from the Rajya Sabha is a desperate attempt to reverse the trend.
Various Members of Parliament at different points of time during the tenure of other Governments have had similar grievances — that they were not given sufficient time to make their submissions and that the ruling party members heckled and hectored them. But this never became an excuse for the aggrieved members to quit the House. By playing the victimhood card, and at a time when her political stock is at an all-time low, Mayawati has gravely miscalculated. She has given up a forum where she could make her voice heard, and which she could use for the betterment of her community. Her sense of insecurity is acute, and it stems from the realisation that the BJP has been making inroads into her vote-bank. The BJP's choice of a Scheduled Caste member, Ram Nath Kovind, for the country's presidentship, had left her stranded. She is now so desperate that she is even considering aligning with the Samajwadi Party to take on the BJP in the 2019 lok Sabha election. In case she does that, she can bid goodbye to even a larger chunk of her Scheduled Caste vote-bank which is antagonistic to the dominance of the Yadav community — the community on whose strength the Samajwadi Party does its politics.