Mayawati's BSP has a new tool to woo Muslims. It's WhatsApp

An aggressive outreach programme

With more than 100 Muslim candidates in the fray, including the Ansari brothers in Mau, Mayawati's BSP has been aggressively going after Muslim voters in a way Mulayam Singh and his other colleagues in the SP would do in the past polls.

In line with this, at a recent rally in Gonda, defying all the advisories of the Election Commission of India (ECI), and the Supreme Court judgement which barred political parties from seeking votes by invoking religion, Mayawati said: "If you vote for Samajwadi Party, not only your vote will go waste but may directly benefit the BJP. You should vote en masse for BSP and not SP."

This statement came right before the fifth phase of polls, where BSP had fielded 18 Muslims in 52 constituencies.

Facing reality

Mayawati's aggression, analysts say, could be a result of the realisation that in the face of the SP-Congress alliance, her Dalit-Muslim formula may not get her the kind of results she was looking at.

Till about a year ago, Mayawati's BSP was being looked at as a strong alternative to SP's rule in the state. But a resurgent BJP, which is riding on it's success in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and hoping to see the Modi magic work again, and the SP-Congress alliance seem to have poured water on Mayawati's hopes.

While Akhilesh Yadav did not specifically go all out wooing Muslims, except for pointing out, with alliance partner Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, how the BJP has been practising divisive politics in an effort to showcase himself as an inclusive leader. The alliance, poll strategists believe, could swing the minority vote in their favour.

These efforts seem to be working. One analyst in the Akhilesh camp claims that the alliance may corner a record percentage of the Muslim votes rendering Mayawati's idea of Dalit-Muslim alliance infructuous.

BSP has never been the first choice of Muslim voters in UP, as surveys and post poll analysis of the past elections have shown.

Akhilesh and the SP, have also been telling the voters on how Mayawati, whom he calls ‘Buaji’ in public meetings, could again tie a Rakhi to the BJP, a subtle hint on how she could again realign with the BJP in case there is a hung house, the possibility of which is now being sensed by strategists in all parties that Catch spoke to.

The social media trail

However, Mayawati's BSP is still out to woo the Muslims, and have been using different media, including YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and even a new news website called National Dastak, which aims to speak for the “Bahujans” as the traditional media is controlled by the “Brahmanical Forces”.

The news site, which reads like the mouthpiece of the BSP, has several videos on its YouTube channel on how Muslims are supporting the BSP. This includes an opinion poll on how the community voted, something which has been banned by the ECI. 

Mayawati’s supporters have also been working overtime to counter her ‘pro-BJP image’ after a video of a 2006 press conference being circulated by both SP and BJP supporters showed her speaking of how she’d transfer her Dalit votes to the BJP as she didn't want a Muslim extremist candidate to win. The clip has caused immense damage and the BSP is attempting to counter it by circulating messages on WhatsApp.

In one such message, they invoke political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot's analysis of where he talks of how Mayawati, despite aligning with the BJP to form a government, did not allow the BJP to further its agenda. She, he said, in fact weakened the BJP in the state, relegating it to the third position. That she used and threw them.

Another message, which perhaps fits the post-truth world we currently live in, where WhatsApp has emerged as the most effective medium of circulating unverified, sometime factually incorrect information, talks about the atrocities committed by the SP government on Muslims. 

The message has some hugely exaggerated claims like how hundreds of children died in the tents post the riots in Muzaffarnagar, how the SP government bulldozed those tents, how Mulayam Singh and family were “watching a Mujra” as Muzaffarnagar burnt, how SP government gave Rs 25 lakh as compensation to the killers of Akhlaq, and how Mulayam Singh invited Modi to a family wedding where the entire family took a selfie with him beside other such instances.  

It starts with how a Muslim named Usman Sheikh gave land to Jyotiba Phule to build a school, and of how Sheikh’s sister and Savitri Bai Phule taught in the same school. It adds how “BR Ambedkar was invited by Maulana Hasrat Mohani for a roza iftar in Ramzan, even as Madan Mohan Malviya refused to even offer him a glass of water”. It also speaks of how after “all Hindus including Gandhi and Nehru conspired and ensured that all doors to the entry to the Constituent Assembly were shut for Ambedkar, the Muslims of West Bengal and ‘chandals’ together voted for him”.

WhatsApp groups are also flush with links to news articles on support for the party by clerics, including Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid Abdullah Bukhari, Shia cleric Kalbe Jawwad Naqvi and Sufi leader Ashraf Kicchochwi, besides articles filled with facts and data on how a Muslim-Dalit alliance could work for the benefit of both the communities.

Despite this, it remains to be seen whether Muslims would fall for Mayawati’s idea. Perhaps 11 March will have the answer.