The chequered history has come to haunt the alliance forged by Bahujan Samaj Party with its once bitter rival, Samajwadi Party, in Uttar Pradesh to checkmate the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
This is the third pre-poll alliance of the BSP — the first was with the SP in 1993 and then with Congress in 1996 for UP assembly elections. This is the first pre-poll alliance of the party for Lok Sabha elections. Both the parties realise that they have not allied from a position of strength and that it is a tie-up for their survival in politics.
While formally announcing the alliance on Sunday, Mayawati said she had buried the hatchet for national interest, putting behind the state guest house incident of June 1995. Akhilesh Yadav reciprocated saying any disrespect to Mayawati would be his insult.
However, questions are being asked whether the bonhomie of the top leaders of the two parties will percolate to the ground level as their cadres were at each other’s throat during the last 25 years. During the last three decades, both the parties carved out a niche for themselves by pursuing strident caste-based identity politics and later to spread their base they shifted to inclusive politics. Will they again revert to the identity politics for consolidating the Dalits and OBCs votes?
Political scientist and author Dr AK Verma maintains that this time the model of the alliance between the two parties is different from 1993. “The BSP of 1993 had the background support of the BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation) and later DS4 (Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti) was also added. It was a class movement where SC and OBCs were together. The slogan of the alliance in 1993 was ‘Mile Mulayam Kanshi Ram, Hava ho gaye Jai Sriram’ and instead of animosity there was deep bonding and togetherness among the two groups,” he points out.
Verma maintains that the June 1995 state Guest House incident was paradigm shift as the homogeneous relations changed into conflictual relationship as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati went on different political trajectories representing the OBCs and Schedule Castes respectively.
The big question is whether the bonhomie of the top leaders of the SP and BSP will reach the ground level. The coming elections are for the Lok Sabha and voters are mature enough to see the difference between the parliamentary and assembly elections.
“This alliance would have been devastating for the ruling party had it been for the UP assembly elections. It is for the Lok Sabha polls so Akhilesh Yadav has projected Mayawati for the top job of the country and left the leadership issue for UP open,” Verma said and added, “It was the political compulsion of Akhilesh to project Mayawati for prime ministership if he has to sustain the alliance for the future elections.”
Political analysts also believe that much water has flown down the Ganga since 1993 and both the parties have learnt the art of realpolitik in the last three decades.
“The first SP-BSP alliance in 1993 was a political experiment and both the parties were greenhorn. Then they were shooting in the dark and now both have experience of governance and have tasted the success of alliance politics. The hostility among the Yadavs and the Dalits in rural hinterland is an old dictum. Presently both Dalit and OBCs, including Yadavs, are deprived and subjugated,” said Professor Vivek Kumar, head of the Centre for Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“It is a western concept to suggest that the BSP is pursuing identity politics. The Dalits can only pursue entity politics as for them the issue is existence rather than identity. The alliance is to tell the voters that they are worthy to govern and rule. They will have to establish that they are also development-oriented along with fulfilling the objectives of social justice,” said Prof Kumar.