In a significant development, BSP chief Mayawati on Sunday re-announced her nephew Akash Anand as her successor. She also reinstated him on the post of the party’s national coordinator. Significantly, this comes after the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati has removed his nephew Akash Anand earlier in May — as BSP’s National Coordinator and her successor, while, terming him immature.
Taking to social media platform X, Mayawati wrote, “I declared Akash Anand as the National Coordinator of BSP and my successor, but in the larger interest of the party and the movement, he is being separated from both these important responsibilities until he attains full maturity”.
BSP chief Mayawati on Sunday held a meeting of all the party officials in Lucknow today, the first since the party’s debacle in the recently concluded Lok Sabha Elections.
Before the scheduled Sunday meeting convened by Mayawati, some of the candidates had cited the decision to remove Anand as BSP national coordinator and his withdrawal from the campaign in the middle of the elections as a possible cause for the shift of Muslim and Dalit votes from the BSP to the SP-Congress alliance.
They also added that his removal could have had an impact on young voters because they want to listen a youngster.Significantly, in the 2024 polls held, the BSP, which contested alone this time, could not win a single seat as compared to its 2019 Lok Sabha election performance, where Mayawati formed an alliance with Akhilesh Yadav and won ten seats. In terms of voting percentage, the party played fairly poorly.
Congress contested only 17 seats in UP, won six seats, and got 9.46 percent of the of the votes. While, BSP contested on all 80 seats, did not win a single seat, and the party got only 9.19 percent of the of the votes. The BSP fielded candidates in 424 Lok Sabha seats across the country, including 79 in UP, and none of them won.