Satish Chandra Mishra, the confidante of BSP supremo Mayawati, who crafted the Dalit-Brahmin alliance that brought BSP with full majority in 2007, is slowly sidelining the latter to take over the control of the party. In the last few months, 11 out of 18 MLAs of BSP have been sacked for anti-party activity and most of them blamed Mishra for it.
“Mayawati only does what Mishra tells her to do. He is destroying the party. The Muslims will abandon the BSP if this arrangement continues,” BSP’s suspended MLA Aslam Ali Rayani said.
In the last few years, Mishra ensured the exit of one influential BSP leader after another. From Lalji Verma and Ram Achal Rajbhar to Nasimuddin Siddiqui, Brajesh Pathak and Swami Prasad Maurya – all of the people who were being seen as possible number two in the party were shown the exit door by Mayawati for anti-party activity, and now Mishra is undisputed number two.
Mishra, who has never fought election, takes care of day to day party activity, funding and all other important party activities. He played a key role in crafting an alliance with Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab for the 2022 assembly election and was seen on stage with Sukhbir Singh Badal, and this signifies his stature in the party.
The party activity of BSP has reduced substantially in the last few years, and the last big thing that it pulled off was making a fool out of Akhilesh Yadav in the 2019 general election when it emerged a major beneficiary of the alliance, winning 10 seats while SP was reduced to 5.
The party got zilch seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the party-supremo immediately went into hibernation. And while people have only started working from home after the pandemic struck, a visionary in Mayawati has been doing so for the last seven years.
The party got only 19 seats in the 2017 assembly elections. Courtesy of the unholy alliance with SP, the party managed to go from zero to ten seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections by eating Akhilesh’s vote share, but since then, it has all been downhill for Mayawati and her archaic party.
In 2017 Assembly polls, BJP managed to receive a gigantic mandate by securing a 41.4 per cent vote share, which translated to the BJP winning 325 seats in a 403-member state assembly. The non-Jatav Dalits played a major role in the victory of the BJP as they voted en masse for the party. Nobody had anticipated such a huge wave of Yogi Adityanath in the state and the opposition and detractors were left dumbfounded at the magnitude of the victory.
Akhilesh Yadav remains in the media limelight and gets good coverage, but mostly for wrong reasons, be it promoting vaccine hesitancy or theft of toti (tap) from the official residence.
Yogi has become the tallest leader in the country. From developing UP into an industrial state to reducing crime to tackling the first and second wave of the coronavirus pandemic effectively, UP has grown strength to strength with Yogi at the helm.
Some people are not happy with the handling of the second wave of coronavirus, but they do not have a better alternative because no one wants Akhilesh Yadav or Mayawati as the CM of Uttar Pradesh again.