Swami Prasad Maurya: “Hard Hindus and soft Hindus are both enemies of the Bahujan community”

Few politicians in Uttar Pradesh have traversed the state’s shifting caste and party equations as extensively as Swami Prasad Maurya. Over the past four decades, he has built a reputation as a formidable voice for the Other Backward Classes and as a sharp critic of Hindutva politics.

Swami Prasad began his political journey with the Lok Dal before joining the Janata Dal, in 1991. Five years later, he defected to the Bahujan Samaj Party, where he would go on to become one of party supremo Mayawati’s most trusted lieutenants. During his two decades in the BSP, he thrice served as the leader of the opposition in the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly. He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party months before it came to power, in 2017, and was labour minister in the first Adityanath government. Just before the 2022 assembly election, he broke with the BJP, accusing the party of neglecting Dalits, backward castes and farmers, and joined the Samajwadi Party. This, too, was short-lived, as he resigned in February 2024 to launch his own outfit, the Apni Janta Party.

With the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly election approaching, Swami Prasad has now set his sights on stitching together a “third front.” This year, he held a string of meetings with OBC and Dalit leaders who are not aligned with either the BJP or the Samajwadi Party—most notably the Nagina MP and Azad Samaj Party chief, Chandrashekhar Azad. Sunil Kashyap, a staff writer at The Caravan, spoke to Swami Prasad about his decades-long political evolution, the future of Bahujan politics and his reasons for proposing a third front in the upcoming election.

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