Mayawati in reverse gear?
The New Indian ExpressFirst Published : 31 Mar 2010 11:42:00 PM
ISTLast Updated : 31 Mar 2010 12:11:16 AM IST
Inscrutable are the ways of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati but
there is a method in the way she has, of late, been treating Satish
Chandra Mishra, who was at one time considered the second most
powerful person in the Bahujan Samaj Party. A lawyer, he came into the
good books of Mayawati when he successfully pleaded for her in a
defection case. He was soon made a party general secretary in which
capacity he organised hundreds of Brahmin sammelans all over the
state. Considered the architect of the Dalit-Brahmin-Rajput social
engineering, he played a major role in the distribution of tickets in
the 1997 Assembly elections — Brahmins and Rajputs got more tickets
than the Dalits. It paid dividends when, for the first time, the BSP
won an absolute majority in the state and formed a government. And
when a State Advisory Council was constituted and Mishra was given its
responsibility, he emerged in popular perception as the power behind
the Mayawati throne. All this gave the impression that the
Bahujan-Brahmin-Kshatriya combination was here to stay and there was
no going back to Manuwadi-bashing days. Alas, the results of the 2009
Lok Sabha elections opened Mayawati's eyes to the gradual erosion in
the Dalit support base of the BSP. Muslims, too, were not enamoured of
the growing upper caste clout as represented by Mishra.
With that came crashing down Mayawati's dream of playing the role of a
king-maker, if not the queen herself, in national politics. She had
difficulty in reconciling herself to the fact that the BSP got only 20
seats, against Congress' 21. Since then she has been asserting the
Dalit character of the government and the party by appointing Dalit
officials to key posts and stating unambiguously that her successor
would be a Dalit. That Mishra's usefulness was over was apparent when
the SAC stopped functioning. Finally, when he was asked to look after
the legal affairs of the party, it signalled the end of what his
detractors call 'Mishra raj' in the BSP. For all his legal and
administrative acumen, he does not have an independent political base
in the state to even think of raising a banner of revolt against
Mayawati. For the time being, he can only wait for the day when the
chief minister realises that the BSP needs upper caste votes to make
it a clear winner. Till then Satish Chandra Mishra can only sulk on
the sidelines.
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