UP’s Heir and Spare | Power Play by Anand Mishra

Dear readers,

Blood is thicker than water, they say. But politics has an uncanny ability to dilute it.

After a series of rebellious nephews hogged the headlines, whether Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee in West Bengal or Sharad Pawar’s nephew Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra, it is now the turn of Uttar Pradesh to see an aunt-nephew (bua-bhatija) showdown. A war rages in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) parivar, where the mercurial Mayawati is trying to nip in the bud a rebellion initiated by her nephew, Akash Anand.

In Maharashtra, of course, it was the bhatija Ajit Pawar who had the last laugh when he successfully engineered a split in his uncle Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Ajit is now part of the ruling BJP-led alliance.

Earlier, during Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray’s lifetime, the power struggle was between his son Uddhav Thackeray and his more vocal nephew Raj Thackeray. The battle became rancorous after the patriarch anointed Uddhav as his successor in 2002.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh saw a similar family feud in 2016-17 between Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle Shivpal Yadav, with political pundits still wondering about who truly had the backing of the patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, who was then alive and very much kicking in politics.

In Bihar, it was another nephew, Chirag Paswan, who eventually emerged victorious in the battle with his uncle Pashupati Kumar Paras for control of the Lok Janshakti Party. But again, the party was founded by his father, Ram Vilas Paswan, and voters accepted Chirag as the rightful heir. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee seems to have checkmated her ambitious nephew for now, but many believe this to be merely the calm before the storm.

Meanwhile, Mayawati has sacked her nephew Anand for the second successive time from the BSP in less than nine months. This has underlined a deepening of fault lines within the BSP, which is reeling from the wounds of three successive Assembly election defeats in the State.

Anand was first removed from the position of the BSP’s national coordinator on May 7 last year, with Mayawati cryptically commenting that he needed to reach “maturity” before taking such an important assignment. Days before this, Anand had termed the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh a “terrorist government”. The nephew was, however, quite mature in his response to Mayawati—saying that her “orders are our obedience”. At that time, the opposition had revived the “BSP is BJP’s B-team” campaign.

Just six weeks later, Anand was reinstated as heir and national party convenor in mid-July last year. Senior BSP leaders claimed that youth voters gained confidence after Anand’s comeback. But his second stint could not last even nine months, despite Anand going into overdrive immediately—even finalising an alliance between the BSP and the Indian National Lok Dal for the 2024 Haryana Assembly election.

On March 2 this year, Mayawati again stripped Anand of all posts “in the interests of the party and the movement”. She recalled how the BSP’s founder Kanshi Ram, while not forbidding relatives and family members of leaders from working in the party, had made it clear that they should be immediately expelled if they damaged the party and the movement.

“Following his path, I have thrown out Ashok Siddharth, the father-in-law of Akash Anand, who has committed the despicable act of weakening the party by dividing it into two factions,” Mayawati said in a press note.

Further, fearing that Siddharth’s dismissal would influence his daughter and consequently also sway Anand, Mayawati divested him of the post of party national coordinator. She alleged that Anand was under the influence of his father-in-law.

Ironically, it was none other than Mayawati herself at whose behest Ashok Siddharth had joined the BSP, rising through the ranks and going on to become a Rajya Sabha member. Siddharth’s daughter Pragya, who holds a medical degree from London, married Anand, who is an MBA student from London, in 2023. The trouble for Anand began in 2024.

Insiders say that the fear of Anand and his father-in-law creating a parallel power structure, complaints from senior party workers about Akash sidelining them, and a string of defeats in Haryana, Delhi, and in the Uttar Pradesh byelections convinced Mayawati to take this drastic measure.

She even went to the extent of declaring that she would not name a successor during her lifetime—perhaps the political equivalent of taking your cricket bat and going home. The development seems to indicate a crash landing of sorts for the high-flying Anand, whose meteoric rise in the BSP had caused much heartburn.

That said, Anand has received support from an unexpected quarter—the Congress, which has, since 2022, been repeatedly snubbed by Mayawati when it has sought an alliance. Quite recently, Rahul Gandhi said that had Mayawati been part of the opposition alliance in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP would not have been able to form a government.

As expected, the Congress seized the opportunity presented by Anand’s firing to claim that the BSP was now “completely BJP-ised”. The party members recalled that Anand had wanted the BSP to align with the Congress and the SP in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Anand, however, slammed “some parties” for thinking his career was finished, and insisted he is “Mayawati’s cadre and stands firmly with her every decision”.

His father Anand Kumar, who happens to be the BSP’s vice president, has maintained a stoic silence. Now, after the back-to-back reshuffling, Mayawati remains the sole authority in the party, assisted by her brother as vice president and two new national coordinators. But on social media, Mayawati has faced a barrage of criticism and accusations for blocking the party’s growth and its transition from a party of old guards to the next generation. Akash Anand’s next move will be closely watched.

The BSP, which won 206 out of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 Assembly seats and secured a 30.43 per cent vote share in the 2007 Assembly election, had shrunk to just one seat in 2022. It got only 12.9 per cent of the votes. Two years later, it didn’t win any seats (of the State’s total 80) in the Lok Sabha election, scoring just 9.3 per cent of votes.

Quite evidently, the latest family row augurs ill ahead of the 2027 Assembly election, with the party seeming to be heading into terminal decline.

As the BSP grapples with its Kabhi Heir, Kabhi Gair (Sometimes heir, sometimes stranger) drama, what do you think about the role of kinship in politics? Write to us.

Until then,

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

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