Bahujan Samaj Party

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), national political party in India. It was formed in 1984. The BSP states that it represents the people at the lowest levels of the Hindu social system—those officially designated as members of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes—as well as other religious and social minorities. The core support group of the BSP consists primarily of the Dalits (Scheduled Castes, formerly called untouchables). The party espouses no specific ideology, other than its opposition to and outspoken criticism of the inequalities of the caste system, and its main tenets are focused on respecting and upholding the constitutional rights of the lower members of Indian society.

The inspiration for the creation of the party was the longtime Dalit activist and constitutional expert Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956). Kanshi Ram (1934–2006), a Dalit and a civil service worker, was spurred into pro-Dalit activism in the 1960s after reading Ambedkar’s writings and through witnessing firsthand caste discrimination. Ram’s efforts to mobilize Dalits and other minorities led to his involvement in politics, in which he spent years crisscrossing Uttar Pradesh state and traveling throughout the country eliciting support for the cause. In 1984 he founded the party and led it until he was succeeded by Kumari Mayawati in 2003. Although Ram was responsible for building the support base for the party, Mayawati shaped and nurtured it into a powerful political force in Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous state—and at the national level. The state long remained the BSP’s stronghold, and the party also has a presence in Punjab state.

The first significant political success for the BSP came in 1993, when it entered into an alliance with the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party for the governance of Uttar Pradesh. In 1995, however, the BSP left the coalition, and Mayawati, with support from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), became chief minister (head of government) in the state. Her first term lasted less than five months, until the BJP withdrew its support. In the next several years Mayawati served two more short stints as chief minister: 6 months in 1997 and another 15 months in 2002–03.

The BSP scored a decisive win in the 2007 Uttar Pradesh parliamentary elections, however, winning 206 of the assembly’s 403 seats. The victory was largely ascribed to the party’s radical shift in its core ideology from focusing exclusively on its low-caste support base to one that embraced all Indian communities, including the Hindu upper castes. In 2004 Mayawati had appointed Brahman lawyer Satish Chandra Mishra as the party’s general secretary. The result of this wider appeal was that in the 2007 polls BSP candidates either won or came second in more than three-fourths of the seats the party contested. The government completed its full five-year term, with Mayawati as chief minister.

The BSP’s administration, however, became known for corruption, unabashed self-aggrandizement (including the installation of hundreds of statues of Mayawati and other BSP figures throughout the state), and a number of financial scandals. Those issues led to the BSP’s downfall in the 2012 state assembly elections. The party managed to win only 80 seats and was forced to leave office, and a humiliated Mayawati withdrew briefly from political activity. She returned quickly, however, with aspirations for higher office.

The BSP has also been a force in national politics. It has had a generally small but influential number of members in both the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) and the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber). As a rule, the party has avoided alliances with other political parties or groupings at the national level, with a few exceptions for brief periods (e.g., with the Samajwadi Party in 1993). It has been more inclined to support but not join coalitions, as it did in 2009, when its 21 members in the Lok Sabha allowed the United Progressive Alliance (led by the Indian National Congress) to attain a majority in that chamber and form a government. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, however, the BSP failed to win a single seat.