Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati again handed over the command of Meerut to her trusted lieutenant Munkad Ali. She also relieved two other leaders on Monday.
Sources said that the BSP chief, who is busy with preparations for the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, is busy giving important organisational responsibilities to her trusted lieutenants besides finding suitable replacements for those who ditched her to join other political parties.
On Monday, Mayawati gave a big responsibility to former Rajya Sabha member Munkad Ali, appointing him again as coordinator of Meerut.
Earlier, this responsibility was with Shamsuddin Rain, who has now been given the responsibility of Bareilly division.
The responsibilities of Satpal Pepla and Mohit Jatav, who were coordinators of several divisions, have also been taken back.
Sources said that to rebuild the party, especially in the wake of some senior party leaders leaving the BSP, Mayawati has now instructed seniors to “hunt” for “potential” leaders within the party to represent castes which lack prominence.
Since 2016, the BSP has lost several second rung leaders and this has eroded the sustainable leadership and representation of several caste groups, like Pasi, Kurmis and Kushwaha-Maurya.
“We do not see these leaders coming back or ‘Behenji’ (Mayawati) re-inducting them. The blanks need to be filled from within the party. Partymen will now scout for potential leaders at every level. They will be groomed into leaders. The party may also import leaders from outside to plug the gap,” said a BSP functionary.
It may be recalled that ahead of the 2017 UP assembly elections, many prominent leaders walked out of BSP. Other Backward Class leader Swami Prasad Maurya quit BSP in June 2016. A month later, another veteran, RK Chaudhary, took the exit route. Chaudhary is a prominent Pasi leader. The Pasi community constitutes the second largest Scheduled Caste community in UP and is around 16 per cent, after Jatavs, who are said to be more than 50 per cent of the state’s total Dalit population.
Expulsion of another influential Pasi leader, Indrajit Saroj, followed in August 2017. These expulsions dented the party’s voter base. It created a panic among leaders and disillusioned the voters.
“We need active leaders to reach out to these Dalit and OBC communities to bring them back to us,” said a party functionary.
Unfortunately, those expelled by the BSP constituted a strong second line of leaders. Some of these leaders have assumed significant positions in other parties and are instrumental in peddling Dalit and OBC politics there. Brijlal Khabri, who quit BSP in October 2016, is now heading the Congress in UP. Naseemuddin Siddiqui, another senior colleague of Mayawati also left her to join Congress. Thakur Jaiveer Singh and SP Singh Baghel, who were with BSP earlier, are now ministers in the Bharatiya Janata Party government. One of the main proponents of BSP’s social engineering experiment in 2007, Brajesh Pathak is deputy chief minister in the BJP government.
“At least a dozen of our former leaders are in the Yogi Adityanath government. In western UP, it has made a big difference for the party as many of these leaders command influence in the region, like our former MP Narendra Kashyap, who joined the BJP,” said sources in the BSP.
Moreover, BSP’s second-in-command Satish Chandra Mishra has been mysteriously missing in action for the past several months and there has been no official word about his present status in the party.