Not that cake, a sandwich for Maya

With BSP's reverse osmosis of a 'sandwich coalition' one thing is clear: UP might witness an incredible social metamorphosis in the days to come

AK Verma Lucknow

The stunning verdict of the UP electorate on May 11, 2007, sent all UP watchers, political pundits and psephologists into hushed silence. Voters proved everybody wrong reminding us of our limitation in anticipating the sovereign moves. The much hyped up prophecies of a divided electorate, hung assembly and coalition government was pushed into history signalling the arrival of 'new politics' in the state. The people delivered to all parties the first lesson in politics: politics must unilaterally establish law and order, and focus on peoples' welfare and societal development.

Mayawati won the elections hands down, but did Mulayam Singh Yadav lose? In the heat of victory and defeat, this question may not be raised by many, but will it be prudent to ignore it? The reason is that though the numbers did not favour Mulayam Singh, but, actually, his vote share remained intact at the same level as in 2002. Surprisingly, out of 70 districts in which the 403 assembly constituencies are spread, the Samajwadi Party (SP) lost votes only in 32 districts, whereas in 38 districts its vote share went up. That showed that even the SP took advantage of the 'reverse social osmosis' (Economic and Political Weekly (EPW): March 10, 2007, pp. 817-820). And that is the reason that the BSP cannot write off Mulayam Singh.

Moreover, the Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) vote share of 30.46 per cent cannot be a matter of complacence for the party because in earlier assembly elections, despite the fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got a much higher vote share, its seats tally was much below the threshold (1993: 33.3 per cent: 177 seats; 1996: 33.9 per cent: 175 seats). It is simply the strange electoral arithmetic of the first-past-the-post system in multi-cornered contests which favoured the BSP.

The people voted the BSP to absolute majority cutting to size all political parties. The Congress had hoped to be an inevitable component of the new government. But the BSP's social coalition experiment through 'reverse social osmosis' made redundant any post poll political coalition. In the BSP's basket there are four major social denominations: Brahmins, OBCs, Dalits and Muslims. In this, the Brahmin-Dalit coalition has been quite enigmatic. For this, Mayawati attempted social metamorphosis (through 'Brahmin Jodo Sammelans' and 'Bhaichara Committees') and synchronised that with philosophical change (from Bahujan Samaj to Sarvajan Samaj). She used a long-term strategy for inclusive politics and applied smart and mature tactics to humble her opponents.

The first signal was given when she stayed away from the municipal elections in UP a few months back just to keep her flock together, and created a false sense of victory and revival in the BJP and the Congress. Most analysts anticipated the BJP's recovery in this backdrop, though,  on deeper analysis, it was clear that in the municipal polls, the BJP was actually a loser at the  municipal council and nagar panchayat level. Whatever gains it had at the corporation level was courtesy the BSP (EPW: December 23, 2006, pp. 5218-5221).

But the question which is being asked in many circles is, will Mayawati be able to retain and further expand her social coalition? This is a natural anxiety as coming together of the two disconnected social groups for power-sharing may be intelligible; but there are more serious issues than this.