By Sushil Kutty
Behan Mayawati is anything but a confused aunt. Consumed by her all-powering and unflagging need to stay in power and suspicious of the barest of darkness descending on her, Mayawati sees danger to her throne from all corners of the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Diwan-e-Khas knowing that the Diwan-e-Aam cannot be controlled or taken for granted.
And to think that the several-times Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has to now fight palace intrigue and clandestine plots to dethrone her. This wasn’t what BSP founder Kanshi Ram had planned for Mayawati and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The problem is Mayawati often forgets the ‘Who’s Who’ in BSP’s Diwan-e-Khas.
And then she’s forced to take action to cover the bases and secure her footing in the party which she herds with an iron fist. ‘Behan Mayawati’ is a difficult person to deal with and one not easy to please. She doesn’t have a direct line of succession but she had a favourite nephew — Akash Anand, the son of her brother ‘Anand.’
But much to her disgust, Akash got too big for his boots, which the spinster aunt took for mutiny on the Bounty and proof that Akash Anand was more henpecked than cockeyed. Akash Anand’s marriage to a BSP politician’s daughter proved to be Akash’s short-lived ‘Anand’ as ‘Behan Mayawati ‘first removed him from all key party posts and then booted him out for relying too much on pillow-talk rather than on common political sense.
It always happens. There’s always a female protagonist in the political family to screw up the arrangement, what is called “palace intrigue.” But Mayawati isn’t talking and nobody in the party has the guts to get to the bottom of the score. What matters is Akash Anand was out on the curb and Anand’s wife Pragya a convenient bug to blame everything on.
“Bahujan Samaj Party Chief Mayawati expels nephew Akash Anand the day after removing him from all key posts” was breaking news along with “she took the decision in the interest” of the BSP, leave aside the real reason, which was that Mayawati felt threatened and just managed to take preventive action.
Akash Anand is used to Mayawati taking such action. The aunt’s actions often make no sense with many of them made at the spur of the moment. Why expel the “boy” the day after removing him from all of key BSP posts when she could have expelled him the very day itself?
Akash Anand was sacked in 2024 also. Then, in a change of heart, Mayawati reinstated him once more as her political heir.
Akash Anand was a political football for the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister with her quirky style of functioning. This time the axe fell on Akash Anand at the BSP’s coordinators’ meeting in Delhi on February 17. Mayawati declared that Akash was no longer the BSP’s national coordinator. Then, at a meeting in Lucknow on March 2, Mayawati relieved Akash from all his posts. On March 3, Akash was expelled from the party — proving that blood was not thicker than water!
Apparently, Akash’s father-in-law Ashok Siddharth, a longtime Mayawati loyalist, had become a parallel power-centre. But Ashok Siddharth guessed he was in trouble. Mayawati cut him asunder by suspending him from the party before she went after Akash Anand. Thanks to Pragya, Mayawati surmised Akash Anand was completely under the thumb of the father-in-law, who had weaned away a bunch of Mayawati’s close confidantes.
In the ‘South’, where Mayawati’s orders were lost in translation, in particular. Where Siddharth dictated party affairs and was involved in managing donations to taking decisions on organisational matters. Mayawati learned a little late that Siddharth was a “parallel power centre” in the party.
Ashok Siddharth has now been replaced by Ramji Gautam as the BSP’s national coordinator. Gautam and Mayawati’s brother Anand are her second-in-command and Mayawati’s old guard supporters believe the party is lucky to survive a takeover by the new guard led by Siddharth and Akash Anand.
It is now very hard for Akash Anand to make a comeback. Anand and Ramji Gautam have taken charge and Anand has a second son, Ishan Anand, to catch Mayawati’s eye though Mayawati has ruled “no more successor or political heir, not in my lifetime, whatever happens when I am gone is when I am gone.”
Mayawati loyalists are convinced Akash Anand along with Ashok Siddharth and Anand’s wife Pragya were a troika. Mayawati referred to Pragya in a press release as “that girl”, which speaks volumes of Pragya’s worth in Mayawati’s eyes. Of late, Mayawati is cagey of every dark shadow she steps into.
Once bitten twice shy and Mayawati believes she’s been bitten several times not just once or twice. Akash Anand was in a bit of a hurry, he could have waited and played the game with man-sense. Appointed as the in-charge of Haryana and Delhi he had failed to leave an impact in the last assembly polls.
Instead, he was more into challenging and changing Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party’s functioning, especially keen on doing away with the BSP’s traditional method of fundraising called the ‘Kitaab System’, which was popular with the party cadre. In effect he was challenging the aunt and that, too, quite openly. Obviously, Behan Mayawati is no pushover and her “patience was wearing thin.”
She even elevated Ishan Anand to Akash Anand’s grade and this should have been a warning but Akash Anand was too smitten by the fair Pragya to see what was coming. Truely, love blinds even the best of 20/20 vision! Akash Anand walked to his own political demise.
Akash Anand’s story is of the slip between the cup and the lip. The BSP legacy will go no further than Mayawati. Another legacy will have to be written by sidelining Mayawati altogether. For now, Akash Anand has been sidelined and Mayawati has hinted that there is no future for the BSP till as long as she’s alive!
India’s tragedy is the severe paucity of second and third rung of leaders in party after party. Party bosses are leeches. Name any one political party with a clear line of succession and we can choose our day of Qayamat! Prime Minister Narendra Modi and ‘Behan Mayawati’ are not different, both head cults.
But capping the Mayawati story is a wedding and Mayawati’s ire at the wedding: The marriage of Ashok Siddharth’s son and Akash Anand’s brother-in-law. The invite did the rounds but Mayawati wasn’t in the mood and she asked BSP leaders not to grace the wedding.
Lots of BSP leaders took her wish as command and stayed away, but Akash Anand was not among them. That was it, end of story for Anand and his father-in-law Ashok Siddharth. Of course, the story is that Mayawati cast the duo out because of “repeated electoral failures” and because they created a “parallel power structure”. The reality is uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. (IPA Service)
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