The official website of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) opens to a smiling portrait of Mayawati. A tab above it says ‘The Leadership’. The dropdown reveals three designations. She is there as president; her brother Anand Kumar is vice-president; and Anand Kumar’s son Akash has the longest designation, chief national coordinator, as of September 3 night.
Besides numerous pictures of Mayawati, and of Dalit activists and social reformers over the past two centuries, only Akash Anand finds a visual slot, mainly in YouTube thumbnails.
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And now even the 31-year-old, foreign-educated nephew finds himself out of favour, for at least the third time in three years, with the latest turn coming in Lucknow earlier in the day.
Mayawati, 70, said on Thursday, at a meeting of the party’s national office-bearers, that she would not give Akash Anand any “significant party responsibility”. She gave a reason quite familiar in the tumultuous screenplay of her succession plan: “Akash Anand still needs to be more mature.” It was not clear whether he lost the designation or just importance.
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Akash Anand was absent from the national meeting. His younger brother, Ishan Anand, was present.
Besides, she announced that the BSP, which has no MLAs in its primary state of Uttar Pradesh, will contest all elections across the country on its own. UP goes to polls in about six months. As does Punjab, the state with the highest Dalit proportion of population at 32 per cent, where the BSP had some success in the 1990s. The party’s lone MP is Ramji Gautam, in the Rajya Sabha; it has none in the Lok Sabha.
The four-time former chief minister also told party leaders she would herself finalise candidates for the 2027 UP contest, devise the campaign, and monitor fundraising. That last bit, related to raising and using funds, was seen as a reason why Akash Anand faced repeated action by his aunt.
Mayawati invoked BSP founder Kanshi Ram to justify her decision about her family. “Just as respected Shri Kanshi Ram ji allowed his family members and other relatives to support in party work, but he was opposed to allowing them to contest elections or give them any position if the government was formed, I too remain firmly committed to that resolution. Acting on this, I have allowed Akash Anand to work in the party… However, Akash Anand still needs to be more mature in this matter. Until then, it would not be appropriate to give him significant party responsibilities,” she said.
A more overt reason was cited at the time of his original ouster in 2024, when he faced a hate speech FIR as he used some strong words to describe the ruling BJP of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Till he attains full maturity” was her phrase at the time too.
He returned after that 2024 turn of events, was again sacked, and returned once more last year. In recent speeches, he has attacked both the Modi government and UP’s BJP government led by Yogi Adityanath, besides UP’s main Opposition Samajwadi Party. An animated orator, who prefers an extempore style as opposed to Mayawati’s self-written paper-reads, he used mirth to speak against price rise and ethanol-blended petrol. Short videos, or reels, featuring bits from his speeches also mock BJP leaders protesting against similar issues when they were in the Opposition.
The in-and-out cycle goes back years, with the last few years more eventful than the beginning. Mayawati groomed Akash Anand as her successor since 2017, appointing him national coordinator in 2019, and formally naming him her political heir in 2023.
In May 2024, during the Lok Sabha campaign, she removed him as national coordinator and withdrew the declaration naming him her heir, after an FIR was registered in Sitapur over a rally speech in which he called the Union government “a bulldozer government and a government of traitors” and said “the party that leaves its youth hungry and enslaves its elderly is a terrorist government”, comparing it to Taliban rule in Afghanistan. She barred him from campaigning.
A family feud added to the drama. Mayawati accused him of acting under the influence of his father-in-law, then a senior BSP leader Ashok Siddharth, and of putting family interests above the party’s.
The Modi government retained power in that election. Akash Anand returned too, reinstated in the latter half of 2024. He was given charge of assembly campaigns outside Uttar Pradesh.
That lasted less than a year. By March 2025, he was stripped of all posts and expelled from the party altogether, over what Mayawati called a “selfish and arrogant” response to a show-cause notice. His father-in-law had been expelled weeks earlier over factionalism.
Party insiders told reporters at the time that the two – Akash Anand and his father-in-law – had begun controlling candidate selection, fundraising and strategy in several states, allegedly sidelining Mayawati’s own confidants such as Ramji Gautam, who has had stints as national coordinator too. In his public response after the 2025 action, Akash Anand wrote on X, “I am a cadre of the most revered Mayawati ji, and under her leadership, I have learnt unforgettable lessons of sacrifice, loyalty and dedication.” He said the decisions of “Behan Ji” — ‘respected sister’, as Mayawati is addressed by supporters — are “patthar ki lakeer”, set in stone.
The aunt’s anger lasted about a month, and Akash Anand was readmitted in April 2025 after a public apology on X, in which he called Mayawati his “only political guru and ideal”. He pledged not to take political advice from any (other) relative. He became chief national coordinator soon after, his older designation carrying an additional, weightier prefix, ‘chief’.
This year was supposed to see him back in the saddle – at least the second-most prominent saddle – with large party meetings. He addressed workers at Hathras on August 10 and at Dankaur in Greater Noida on August 25, the latter his first major political event in Gautam Buddh Nagar. He even announced the candidates for two assembly seats. Meetings across the state were planned for October and November, as voting is likely in February.
He attacked not just the BJP, but the Congress and its allies too. He said the Congress had “hijacked” the students’ movement at Jantar Mantar, apparently referring to the Cockroach Janta Party protest. He also accused the Rahul Gandhi-led Opposition of disrupting parliamentary proceedings “to prevent debates on inflation and unemployment”.
Mayawati with Akash Anand during one of their cordial periods. (File)
Mayawati herself called the Congress “strongly anti-Dalit and anti-Ambedkar” at the September 3 party event. She also criticised the RSS, the BJP’s ideological fount. Citing remarks made by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat during his recent US visit, she said the RSS “lacks credibility” on issues of religious egalitarianism and caste-based reservation. She has been accused by Congress leaders and others over the past few years of being soft on the BJP, to guard herself against action in corruption cases.
Akash Anand was direct in his criticism of the ruling party at recent rallies. He had a youth or Gen-Z pitch folded in, as Dalit politics now has another young face in Azad Samaj Party (ASP) chief Chandrashekhar Azad. At one point, Akash Anand was seen as the BSP’s counter to Azad, a lawyer-activist who won the Nagina seat in western UP in 2024. Azad often faces taunts from Mayawati herself over his combative, street-style politics.
Akash Anand studied in Delhi and Noida before completing an MBA at the University of Plymouth in the UK. Credited with building the BSP’s social media presence, he went viral himself with a speech that cost him his posts in 2024.
That year, the BSP got no seats in the Lok Sabha polls. Its vote share was just a shade above 2 per cent nationwide, and just above 9 per cent in UP. The decline had begun earlier.
The party contested all 403 seats alone in the 2022 UP assembly polls, got about 13 per cent of the vote, but won just one seat. The party’s lone MLA died earlier this year. That’s a gradual but defining fall from the 206 seats and 30 per cent vote of the 2007 elections, when Mayawati won and served a five-year tenure.
Mayawati has said she will continue to lead the party and that no formal successor will be named in her lifetime. She recently handed her party’s long-time Brahmin face, Satish Chandra Mishra, charge of the party’s legal and media teams and Election Commission-related matters. That is seen as a bid to recreate a Dalit-Brahmin coalition that made her CM in 2007.
Data says the so-called upper castes vote overwhelmingly for the BJP. CSDS-Lokniti found that 89 per cent of Brahmins picked the BJP in the 2022 assembly election, along with 87 per cent of Thakurs (Rajputs) and 83 per cent of Vaishyas.
And the Dalit vote in UP – about a fifth of the electorate – is not a Mayawati monolith anymore. The most intense ideological battle is playing out between her BSP and Chandrashekhar Azad’s ASP. Positioning himself as the true inheritor of the late BSP founder Kanshi Ram’s aggressive grassroots politics, Azad has appealed to younger, more assertive Dalit voters, especially in western UP.
Chandrashekhar Azad is a rising face within Dalit-Bahujan politics, while Akhilesh Yadav has also made a wider pitch in recent elections.
While the BSP still has a hold among a loyal core of older Jatav voters within the Dalit fold, the ASP is expanding to Muslims and OBCs and any sections deprived of opportunities. Before her latest outburst at nephew Akash, Mayawati recently urged Gen Z to stay away from both BJP and Congress, and other blocs, alleging they had ignored the youth’s issues.
Akhilesh Yadav’s SP, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its footprint beyond OBC sections and Muslims, through its PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak, or Backward, Dalit, Minority) alliance. It has chipped away at a chunk of the non-Jatav Dalit vote by running on a “save reservation”. Rahul Gandhi is taking the same pitch nationally, while his student meetups and Insta-friendly avatar seek to woo the young voter at large. The BJP is seeking to recover after a Gen-Z jolt, with Modi pointedly speaking to the youth.
It is in this context that Mayawati struggles to end the rift at home with her once-chosen successor, who was supposed to take the BSP to a younger voter. A likely alternative was in the room at the September 3 event. Ishan Anand, Anand Kumar’s younger son, was brought into party work at Mayawati’s birthday event in January 2025. He has held no announced organisational role since, though his presence and his elder brother Akash’s absence were read together.
For now, Akash Anand remains with the BSP and is a “youth leader” and “visionary”, if you go by the party’s official website at 10:30 pm on September 3.
