With UP assembly polls nearing, Mayawati back to brahmin wooing

LUCKNOW: With state assembly elections a few months away, chief minister Mayawati has begun wooing Brahmins. Inaugurating a Brahmin Bhaichara Sammelan on Sunday, she supported reservation for the poor and unemployed upper castes.

Despite upper castes remaining at the helm for several years, most Brahmins remain economically backward and face problems of poverty and unemployment, she told the meeting.

The Sammelan was organised by BSP as a show of strength for the community which had played an important role in the party's success in the 2007 assembly election. Mayawti claimed that her government had accommodated Brahmins in important positions.

On Saturday, Mayawati inaugurated the Shakuntala Mishra University for the disabled. The university is named after the mother of party leader Satish Chandra Mishra. Mishra was the only leader sharing the dais with her.

She had earlier planned to only inaugurate the university and the Brahmin sammelan was supposed to be a solo Satish Chandra Mishra event. Party leaders said the Brahmin leader has been brought back into the thick of things and is again being projected as a core leader of the party, to send a signal to his community.

Mayawati had engineered the Brahmin-Dalit electoral formula in the 2007 assembly polls, which enabled BSP to bag a majority in the assembly.

BSP, with its committed Dalit votebank, used to languish between 60-90 seats, and it was only when it realised that the vote of a single community would not take it far that the Dalit-Brahmin electoral engineering was conceived.

Mishra, a successful lawyer close to Mayawati, was made the face of this Brahmin campaign and it was his hard work which brought handsome dividends to the party.

But after Dalit apathy to BSP presumably emerged when Mishra appointed a large number of his relatives in plum posts, BSP did poorly in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls.

Sensing that her core Dalit votes where wary of the overt Brahmin wooing and extra importance accorded to them, Mayawati disbanded the key Bhaichara Samitis constituted at district levels for bringing the two voting groups together.

She also relegated Mishra to the sidelines asking him to only take care of legal cases filed against her and the government.

For the last many months, though Mishra was seen near Mayawati on some key occasions, he was not given any important political role or brought to the forefront on key issues.

With the state Congress being led by a Brahmin, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, and BJP also relying heavily on Kalraj Mishra for its UP poll campaign, Mayawati does not want the community to fall into the lap of political adversaries