“You criminalise our diet, and make us feel like the children of a lesser god. After making us outcastes, you want our vote? Votehamara , rajBJPka , kab tak bevakoof banaogey? (The vote is ours and the rule BJP’s. How long will you make a fool of us?),” asks a close associate of Mayawati, four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The mood may not be quite as belligerent as it was when the Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram raised the ‘ Tilak tarazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote char slogan(Wield your shoes on the upper castes), but the disquiet against Amit Shah-led BJP is unmistakable.

Sixty-year-old Mayawati is convinced that the big fight for UP in February is going to be her big moment and is upping the ante. Exhibiting a rare sense of humour, she is believed to have told Satish Mishra and Naseemuddin Siddiqui, her close aides, “The time of women leaders seems to have come. I hope Hillary Clinton gets elected. We both need to make history.’’

This urge to make history has seen Mayawati gearing up like never before. The BSP, which managed a 20 per cent vote share in the last general elections despite not winning a single seat, is not taking any chances. And Mayawati is seriously eyeing the Muslim votes. At 19.3 per cent of UP’s population, Muslims play a crucial role in at least 125 of the 403 constituencies in the State. Mayawati now makes it a point to begin her public meetings in Muslim-dominated areas with verses from the Koran. The BSP has given out a record 100 tickets to Muslim candidates and Naseemuddin’s young son Afzal has been assigned the ‘Muslim bhaichara’ (Muslim outreach) programme. Afzal is taking up issues which concern UP’s youth, including better educational facilities and what could be the game changer this elections — jobs. He has also activated the BSP’s social media cell. “The BSP youth page has more that 50,000 likes on Facebook,” says Afzal.

Mayawati has shed her scepticism about social media; the BSP now has a Twitter handle and Mayawati is expected to make her grand arrival on Twitter before the elections.

The Samajwadi Party’s near-implosion has also come as a boon for Mayawati. On paper, an alliance between the Muslims and the Dalits holds the key to Lucknow. The Muslims are now looking at Mayawati as the only viable option to stop the BJP from returning to power after 15 years.

The BSP leader, though, has an amiable relationship with Akhilesh Yadav, the UP chief minister, who calls her ‘ bua ’ (aunt). But it is her visceral dislike for Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh’s father and her oldest political foe, which makes her watch with glee the SP’s current troubles. The BSP leader has the memory of an elephant, and is not one to forget insults and slights. “The incident in 1995 at the guesthouse when behenji (as Mayawati is popularly called) was attacked by the SP cadre is a Draupadi moment for her. She had sworn vengeance and is still nursing that hurt. This time it will be the BJP and Amit Shah who will feel her wrath,” says a close aide.

Mayawati has already visited almost all the 73 constituencies which gave BJP its sweep in the general elections in 2014. She met and asked voters what the BJP vote had brought them. “ (Narendra) Modi toh PM bana, uskey achhe din aaye. UP ke logon ke achhe din aaye kya ? (Modi has become the PM, his good days are here. Is it good days yet for the people of UP?),” she asks at public meetings. It may have been tactless on BJP leader Nitin Gadkari’s part to quip that “The achhe din slogan has become a millstone around the BJP’s neck”. But it rings true in the UP hinterlands when Mayawati taunts the voters.

After two-and-a-half years of the Modi government, the UP voters are upset with the lack of ‘ badlav ’ (change) and ‘ vikas’ (progress). BJP president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Modi’s exhortations that “UP needs to elect BJP for suraaj (good governance)” are met with stony silence. The absence of a CM face is also hurting the BJP on the ground, despite Shah’s energetic exertions. He has hardly visited Punjab, another poll-bound State, and has been camping in Lucknow with his trusted Gujarat team and RSS pointsmen, mapping out UP polling booth by booth. The BJP has taken a gamble by pitching Modi as its face after the Delhi and Bihar debacle.

Shah’s use of the Army’s ‘surgical strike’ in Uri for electoral gains has not had the desired impact on the ground. A BJP MP, who confesses that he is facing anti-incumbency, says, “We are trying to get people high on patriotism when they want roads, jobs, roti, bijli (electricity) and an end to lawlessness. Whereever I go in my constituency, I am asked, “ Bhaiyya, kahan hai achhe din ? (Brother, where are the good days?) What do I say?’’

This Diwali, the Prime Minister had exhorted people to honour the sacrifices of soldiers. “Our jawans have been sacrificing their lives the last few months. We should celebrate this Diwali in their name,” he had urged. Balram Yadav, a young man I met in Lucknow, had voted for the BJP in the last elections and hails from a family with several serving soldiers. He says, “The Army has been making sacrifices for years, Modiji has noticed it only now.” He is fed up of the lawlessness in Gorakhpur, his hometown, and says he’ll vote for Mayawati this time. “At least she will stay here and do some work and not keep visiting foreign countries,” he adds. He was forced to move to Lucknow because Gorakhpur hardly offered any jobs. Interestingly, gossip among the Lucknow elite revolves around the shenanigans of the ruling Yadav family and a ₹1,000-crore declaration, supposedly made from Gorakhpur, under the new income declaration scheme. Incidentally, the controversial company Sahara started out from Gorakhpur.

Mayawati, though, is not leaving anything to chance. A fifth term as the CM, she believes, will be a natural springboard to prime ministership. After the NDA government’s ‘beef offensive’, Dalits in other states too have come on board and so have Muslims. Mayawati is reaching out to the Brahmins, who form only 10-12 per cent of the State’s population but influence the swing vote. Satish Mishra is Mayawati’s outreach to the Brahmins, a segment that is being wooed by every political party in this elections.

The Congress, a non-starter in the State, has presented Sheila Dikshit as the CM candidate; she was hardly visible during Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Khat Yatra’. She was rarely mentioned in speeches or found on posters.

Meanwhile, the BJP has sneaked in Swati Singh, wife of disgraced Thakur leader Daya Shankar Singh, who was expelled for calling Mayawati a ‘prostitute’, as an office-bearer. In-house surveys conducted by Amit Shah so far indicate that the upper-caste vote is solidly with the BJP. Mayawati is, however, trying to change that by focusing on law and order, which had been the highlight of her term as CM as against the ‘jungle raj’ unleashed by the warring Yadavs.

Mayawati has also treated with contempt Rahul Gandhi’s recent efforts at building a voter base in UP. She has already spurned three offers from the Congress for an alliance. “What do you bring? My votes get transferred. You have no vote base here any more,” is what she is supposed to have told Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. Mayawati has clearly embraced her inner ‘nasty woman’. In the Congress, Prashant Kishor, the strategist, is invisible on the ground. The lack of organisation is palpable. Some party offices have been turned into tea shops. The one in Azamgarh is notably called ‘Pappu chai wala’. Congress workers, the few oldtimers on the ground, talk yearningly of Priyanka Gandhi’s post-Diwali entry. But even they admit this is wishful thinking. The Gandhi name no longer carries the same cachet. Santosh Tiwari, a Congress worker, says despondently, “If either Rahul or Priyanka were candidates, poori picture badal jati (the picture would change). But these days the Gandhis don’t commit to jobs.’’

To be fair, this is what Kishor had wanted — a Gandhi as a candidate for UP CM; not a wannabe PM-in-waiting. Kishor now finds himself increasingly out of favour in the party, and when Raj Babbar, the State unit chief, recently called him a ‘sound recordist’, it only added to the insult.

Satish Mishra cannot hide his sarcasm when he says, “We don’t outsource our politics to hired guns. The BSP ideology is with behenji and that’s all we need.” Post-Diwali, the BSP is expected to introduce a surprise package to make another resounding pitch for the Dalit vote — the Ahmedabad-based Gujarat Dalit rights leader Jignesh Mewani. Mewani may not share the stage with behenji, but is expected to address rallies and share the story of Gujarat’s Dalit uprising. Mewani’s pitch is simple — the BJP and RSS believe fervently in the ‘varna’ system, which pushes and keeps the Dalits at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s a potent pitch, one that is bound to resonate among the Dalits of UP. Mayawati is tapping into it and astutely combining it with the economic pressure ‘beef politics’ is putting on the livelihood of Dalits and Muslims.

Not surprisingly, jobs seem to have a greater impact in UP than ‘faux nationalism’. Says Naseemuddin Siddiqui, “This is typical BJP. Destroy the Babri Masjid, then give dreams of the Ram Mandir; promise achhe din, then move onto patriotism. Are we less patriotic than the BJP? Who are they to question our nationalism?”

This time around, Mayawati has deliberately kept away from the monuments dedicated to herself — statues, with the signature handbag, erected in different parts of UP. Maybe she senses a more permanent way of making history.

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