Pressure or posturing: the curious case of Akash Anand’s dismissal

This was the impression of a senior Bahujan Samaj Party leader about the party’s then-national coordinator Akash Anand when he addressed a rally in Ghaziabad on April 7.

“Humare paas bhi gora chitta jawan hai (we also have a fair and handsome young man) who could answer political opponents and the media in their language.” This was the impression of a senior Bahujan Samaj Party leader in western Uttar Pradesh about the party’s then-national coordinator Akash Anand when he addressed a rally in Ghaziabad on April 7.

A month later, Mr. Anand, who completed a post-graduate degree in London before joining politics, was sacked from the position by his aunt and BSP supremo Mayawati, after he was booked for a model poll code violation for using abusive language against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in his speeches.

Party sources are quiet on their party chief’s decision to remove Mr. Anand till “he becomes mature”, but they do point out the parts of Mr. Anand’s speeches that were not unparliamentary and seemed politically mature.

A look at his speeches, right from the Ghaziabad rally, indicates that he was targeting the BJP much more pointedly than the Samajwadi Party. He questioned the “financial prudence” of the BJP’s ration doles and described it is “an opium that is being fed to 80 crore Indians”. He went on to make impromptu calculations to tell the audience that they would have eaten much better had the government ensured even class IV jobs for them. “You would have made at least ₹2.5 lakh a year but now you are getting, at the most, ₹12,000 a year in the form of ration.” He alleged that ₹2 lakh crore of people’s taxes go into feeding 80 crore Indians. “This tax money, which should have gone into making schools, hospitals, and providing clean water, is being spent on ration,” he noted.

He also underlined that the BSP is the only party which came out clean in the recent revelation of electoral bond scheme data. It was only after he felt that the audience was not responding to his maths and English phrases that he would switch to a more aggressive tone, perhaps to match the emerging competition from Chandra Shekhar Azad of the Azad Samaj Party.

Observers said that his speeches did not go down well with the ruling dispensation. It also pushed the right-wing ecosystem to question the source of the BSP’s funding. Mr. Anand’s removal in the middle of the election process is being seen as the BSP’s surrender to the BJP, which will help the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance. Now there is no fig leaf left for the BSP to hide behind as far as Ms. Mayawati’s Muslim vote bank is concerned, and the Jatavs are also puzzled.

There is a section in her community that feels that she is running with the hare and hunting with the wolves in this election. Though she has fielded 20 Muslims and four Yadavs to scuttle the chances of the SP, there are several seats where her candidates are also making the BJP sweat it out this summer.