Do we like Mayawati?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words of her own turned up and she is a major Dalit voice, but lingering corruption allegations and a purge of her own party's leaders keep it middling.
Mayawati is the boss of the Bahujan Samaj Party and a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister who built her name as the face of Dalit politics. The Brahmin-Dalit coalition that brought her to power couldn't be sustained, analyst AK Verma told Outlook, and her voter base drifted towards the BJP. The party won 80 seats in the 2012 state election, 19 in 2017, one in 2022, and no Lok Sabha seats in 2024.
Her best-known stoush is the statues. Critics asked a court to pull down the dozens of statues of her as a waste of public funds, and in a signed statement she said they reflected what the public wanted and called the case politically motivated. Separately, a disproportionate assets case alleged against her was quashed by the Supreme Court in July 2012, which noted the CBI's 2008 report had no finding she'd amassed such assets in 1995 to 2003. Still, a former BSP MP told Outlook that “the corruption allegations against Mayawati have stayed with her.”
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up in her own words. Her recent push has been to rebuild a Dalit-Muslim base: in October 2025 she announced two-member Muslim Brotherhood Committees in each of UP's 18 mandals and urged Muslim voters to back the BSP. Honest gap: we found no statement from her on LGBTQ+ or trans rights either way, so that part of the file is thin. She has also copped abuse herself: in 2019 a BJP MLA, Sadhana Singh, called her a “blot on womankind”, and the National Commission for Women sought an explanation.
The fresh mess is inside her own party. On 10 September 2026 she expelled Akash Anand, a week after removing him as national convener, and said his silence on a post of hers showed family ties came first. His father-in-law, former Rajya Sabha MP Ashok Siddharth, had been expelled for a second time on 2 August over alleged anti-party activities before announcing his retirement. Critics such as a former BSP MP say her promotion of family members goes against the party's founding principles.
On strategy, she said on 15 January 2026 that the BSP will contest all elections alone and form a government with a full majority in Uttar Pradesh. Fact-checkers have been busy with her: BOOM rated False a viral graphic suggesting she'd back the BJP in 2022, tracing it to an October 2020 council-poll remark, after which she said the BSP “will not forge an alliance with BJP”. Her critics would say the numbers speak, with the BSP now holding no seats in either house of Parliament.
The good stuff is harder to pin down from pages we could open. What the record shows is decades as the main Dalit voice in a huge state, and a current push to bring Dalits, Tribals, Backwards and Muslims under one banner. We couldn't open reporting on charity or personal kindness, so this is a political record rather than a character reference.