As LS poll looms, Mayawati names 28-yr-old nephew as her successor. Who is Akash Anand?

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leaders on Sunday said party president Mayawati had named her nephew Akash Anand her successor as party chief. The announcement was made during a meeting in Lucknow to discuss the coming Lok Sabha elections. The BSP president has yet to make an official declaration.

Party leaders said the BSP chief gave Akash the responsibility to strengthen the party in states apart from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, a task he had already been handling in the run-up to the recent Assembly elections.

Akash, the son of Mayawati’s younger brother Anand Kumar, oversaw the party’s poll preparation in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh. In a departure from the party’s usual strategy of not organising padayatras and demonstrations, in August he led a 14-day padayatra in Rajasthan where he has been in charge of the party’s affairs since last year. The party failed to match its 2018 performance of winning six seats, bagging only the constituencies of Sadulpur and Bari.

Akash played a role in the campaigns in MP, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana too. In June, the BSP chief deployed him and Rajya Sabha MP Ramji Gautam, the central coordinator for these states, to prepare and launch the election campaign on issues concerning Dalits, religious minorities, OBCs, and tribals. On August 9, Akash led a foot march in Bhopal during which there was an attempt to gherao the Raj Bhavan, raising the issues of the marginalised. Despite its efforts, the party failed to open its account in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana.

Akash completed his schooling in Delhi and his MBA degree in London. He returned to India in 2017 and in May of that year accompanied Mayawati to Saharanpur where a Thakur-Dalit clash had occurred. He was introduced to party workers in September 2017, a few months after the BJP came to power in the state after registering a massive victory in an election in which the BSP finished third with 19 seats.

Akash became more active politically in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election and was credited with bringing his aunt over to social media platform X. In 2019, a day after the Election Commission banned Mayawati from campaigning for 48 hours, Akash took to the stage and addressed his first rally, urging people to vote for the SP-BSP-RLD alliance. 

SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and then RLD president Ajit Singh also joined him on stage. A few weeks after the alliance’s defeat, Mayawati appointed him the party’s national coordinator and tasked him with reaching out to the youth, especially those from the Dalit community, and bringing them into the BSP fold.

After the UP Assembly polls last year, the BSP chief told the cadre that she would send Akash to different parts of UP to collect “truthful progress reports of work done by the party” and encourage youth workers.