The Uttar Pradesh chief minister kick-started her campaign in Karnataka by projecting a 'pro-poor' image and allayed fears that she was 'anti-upper caste'.
CHENNAI/TRIVANDRUM: After striking a victorious yet short-lived partnership with the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh in 1993, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder-president Kanshi Ram decided to conquer Andhra Pradesh.
Now, after securing her position as the undisputed leader of the Hindi heartland, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati is following in her mentor’s footsteps and entering the caste-riddled maze of South India.
After Mysore, she will visit Chennai in Tamil Nadu on Monday and Kottayam in Kerala on Tuesday.
Though Kanshi Ram failed to reap any major gain in Andhra Pradesh, analysts feel that the South remains a happy hunting ground for the BSP’s brand of Dalit politics.
But if the party can find an easy gap to fill in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, it has peculiar challenges to face in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where it plans to contest all parliamentary seats alone.
“South India has had a tradition of Dalit movements. But most of them didn’t last, except perhaps in Tamil Nadu. In Karnataka and AP, there is no Dalit party worth the name. There is a place for the BSP and they are working hard to fill it,” says C Lakshmanan, assistant professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.
Tamil Nadu’s Dalit parties are already feeling the pinch. Two legislators from Viduthalai Chiruthaigal and the Pattali Makkal Katchi have resigned to join the BSP. The BSP got a prize catch in P Sivakami, who quit the IAS to pursue politics.
The BSP is entering unknown territory by contesting alone, though its leaders are eager to go soft on the Left, which leads the ruling front in Kerala, and plans to partner the opposition AIADMK in Tamil Nadu.
If the party sticks to its earlier stand — Mayawati had reportedly asked CPI(M) boss Prakash Karat to give five Lok Sabha seats in Kerala and West Bengal in lieu of three in Uttar Pradesh — it would be a barometer of Dalit power.
Kerala poses more unique problems. “The Left has been responsible for destroying every single Dalit icon. This is a point that the BSP can take up. But the party has to form an academic programme to counter the CPI(M),” says MB Manoj, Dalit scholar and BSP office-bearer.
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