In the Organiser’s front-page analysis of the BSP’s victory in the UP elections, editor R. Balashankar is all praise for Mayawati and concedes that she took away a chunk of BJP’s votes, not the SP’s. Clearly disappointed with the BJP for letting the saffron brigade down, he writes: “The BJP lost steam midway. Its campaign got stuck between half-hearted Hindutva and development governance.”

Mayawati, he claims, won because she appealed to the Hindus. According to him, “For the first time in her political career Mayawati played a leveler and social harmoniser. Her campaign was largely Hindu centric. Arguably, of all the non-BJP politicians only Mayawati understood the dynamics of a united Hindu constituency.”

Although she did not openly play a Hindu card, “but like Indira Gandhi, on an altogether different format in the eighties, Mayawati subtly advanced a soft Hindutva line, appealing to the so-called Manuwadis even as she told her bahujan samaj that their interest rested in a unified Hindu social order rather than artificially created barriers promoted by disparate interests to keep the society mutually suspicious.”

Myth of Muslim vote bank

If Mayawati is praised for her alleged soft Hindutva credentials, the Muslim voter also receives some left-handed compliments. In the same article, Balashankar writes that the myth of the Muslim vote bank was also busted in this election. The results prove “Muslims too behave like the rest of the electorate in the country, they have their caste and religious divide, they are divided between Shias and Sunnis, as upper caste and Dalit, rich and poor, fanatic and liberal.”

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