Akash Anand, named Mayawati’s political successor, is her nephew. He is the national coordinator of BSP and played a crucial role as the BSP’s in-charge for the recent held Rajasthan assembly polls. He also worked extensively for the BSP in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana. Mayawati had deployed him as part of a delegation to prepare and launch the party’s poll campaign covering issues on Dalits, religious minorities, OBCs, and tribals.Akash Anand entered politics in 2017 at a young age of 22. An MBA graduate from London, his political debut was with Mayawati at a rally in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur, where he shared the dais with Akhilesh Yadav and Ajit Singh.In 2019, Akash Anand addressed his first rally in Uttar Pradesh’s Agra. The BSP was then a part of the Mahagathbandhan, which was an anti-Congress and anti-BJP bloc formed in the run-up to the 2019 general election under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati with Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal.Earlier this year, in a major shift from the party’s usual strategy of not organising padayatras, Akash Anand launched a 14-day ‘Sarvajan Hitay, Sarvajan Sukhay’ Sankalp Yatra, signalling a repositioning of the BSP’s strategy ahead of the Assembly polls in Rajasthan and the crucial Lok Sabha polls next year.According to reports, Mayawati was grooming Akash Anand for the long haul. The son of Mayawati’s brother Anand Kumar, 28-year-old Akash Anand is a regular in BSP circles. On Instagram, he calls himself a “young supporter of Baba Saheb’s vision. I stand for Education, Empowerment, and Equality.”
News with Thinking