OBC leader who stirred Ramcharitmanas row, serial party hopper — who is Swami Prasad Maurya – ThePrint – Select

Seventy-year-old Maurya, whose career in Uttar Pradesh politics began with the Lok Dal in the 1980s before a stint with the Janata Dal, saw his fortunes rise after he defected to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1996 and eventually went on to serve as a cabinet minister under Mayawati. He was the leader of the Opposition in the state assembly from 2012 to 2016, when he left the BSP and — after the brief interlude of the new party — joined the BJP.

He was the minister of labour, employment and coordination in Yogi Adityanath’s cabinet when he quit his post and the party in January 2022 to move to the SP. Maurya’s two-year stint in the Akhilesh Yadav-led party was marked by his controversial statements about Hindu scriptures and deities — most notably, his comments on the Ramcharitmanas — that led to rumblings of discontent within the SP as he grew to be a burden for Yadav, according to one analyst.

A week after resigning as a party national general secretary, Maurya quit the SP this past Tuesday citing “ideological differences” with Yadav. He announced his new outfit, the Rashtriya Shoshit Samaj Party (RSSP), Thursday. At the same time, he has been speaking in favour of the INDIA bloc of opposition parties — of which the SP is a part — and hinting that he may join Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. 

Over the years, Maurya has developed a deep support base among the Maurya, Kushwaha, Shakya and Saini voters of eastern and central Uttar Pradesh. However, analysts say his move to the SP from the BJP was a mistake and his career has been on a downslide since then; he was defeated in the 2022 assembly polls immediately after his defection. 

Shashikant Pandey, head of the Department of Political Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, said that Maurya was at the peak of his career when he was in the BSP. 

“He was with the ruling party at the time, was young and had been a grassroots worker. He no doubt had the image of a hero among his supporters but of late, he has continued to change his loyalties speedily and his followers can’t keep pace with it. While he has die-hard supporters among the lower OBCs, education is gradually increasing among these communities and when they exercise judgement, such a leader loses credibility,” he said.

Pandey added: “He was a minister in the BJP government but when he thought that he wouldn’t get a ticket, he made a backdoor entry into the SP but lost the election. Since then, he continued to make controversial statements about Hindu scriptures, gods and goddesses, leading to major resentment within the SP against him; several SP leaders had complained about his statements. He had become a burden for Akhilesh Yadav.”

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Maurya’s career

Born in Pratapgarh’s Chakwar village, Maurya is an Allahabad University alumnus who holds a degree in law as well as an MA. He formally entered active politics in the year 1980 and started his career with the Lok Dal.

He served as the general secretary of the Yuva Lok Dal from 1981 to 1989 and made his first foray into electoral politics when he contested an assembly election as a candidate in the erstwhile Dalmau (now Unchahar) constituency in 1985.

Despite competing in elections several times for the Lok Dal and the Janata Dal, he was unsuccessful until 1996, when he switched to the BSP and was elected as the MLA for Dalmau on its ticket. The BSP’s Mayawati would become chief minister for a brief stint the following year, during which time Maurya would serve in her cabinet.

He would go on to serve as leader of the Opposition between September and October 2001 during the Rajnath Singh administration, and as a cabinet minister during Mayawati’s next two governments from May 2002 to August 2003 and from 2007 to 2012.

After representing Dalmau twice, Maurya lost the constituency in 2007 despite the BSP wave in the state. However, Mayawati nevertheless inducted him into the cabinet through the legislative council route. He later went on to become the MLA for the Padrauna assembly constituency after winning a by-election in 2009, and kept the seat in the 2012 state polls. 

He was leader of the Opposition again from 2012 to 2016, during the Akhilesh Yadav government. After joining the BJP in 2016 — disregarding open invitations to join the SP from party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, his brother Shivpal Singh Yadav and Azam Khan — he retained his Padrauna seat in the 2017 state assembly elections. However, analysts said that Maurya could count on a BJP wave that year in addition to his own support base.

Maurya wasn’t the only one to leave the state BJP ahead of the 2022 polls; the party also had to grapple with the departures of two other ministers, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dharam Singh Saini, and several MLAs. However, none of this would stand in the way of the BJP’s victory.

Maurya himself was defeated in that election. The SP had made him its candidate in Fazilnagar — a seat with sizeable populations of backward-class Kushwaha and Chanau voters as well as the party’s core vote bank of Muslims and Yadavs — rather than Padrauna. But he lost to the BJP candidate, Surendra Kumar Kushwaha. 

The SP then accommodated Maurya as a member of the legislative council (MLC), a position from which he resigned when he quit the party last week. 

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Controversial stint in SP

Over the past two years, Maurya has emerged as the most controversial voice on the opposition benches due to his comments about the Hindu religion, its scriptures and deities, which at times drew the ire of members of his own party. 

The first major controversy was sparked by his remarks about Tulsidas’s epic Ramcharitmanas in January 2023, when he objected to some of the portions of the text — calling them “anti-backward” and “anti-Shudra” — and demanded that either they be removed from the text or the whole book be banned. In an interview with ThePrint soon afterwards, Maurya justified his remarks, saying that he was talking about the sentiments of “97 percent of the population, including the Dalits, Adivasis, backward castes and women”. 

His comments attracted a vociferous attack from the ruling BJP, Hindutva groups including the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha and religious figures such as ‘Jagadguru’ Paramhans of Ayodhya, who, ANI reported, declared a Rs 500 reward for anyone who brought him Maurya’s head — offering a small sum as this reflected Maurya’s “status”.  The controversy snowballed when the supporters of another Ayodhya-based religious leader, Mahant Raju Das, came to blows with Maurya’s supporters during an event in Lucknow last year.

The controversy put the SP on the back foot and it distanced itself from Maurya’s comments on the Ramcharitmanas. Several FIRs were lodged against Maurya in UP and MP on complaints by groups including the Hindu Mahasabha. 

Unfazed, Maurya continued to make more controversial comments. In April 2023, he invoked an old slogan that had resonated in the 1993 UP assembly polls: “Mile Mulayam, Kanshiram, hawaa me udh gaye Jai Shri Ram (when Mulayam Singh and Kanshiram got together, chants of Jai Shri Ram were blown away).” He was speaking at a rally organised by the SP to mark the unveiling of a bust of BSP founder Kanshiram at a college in Raebareli.

A day after the speech, Maurya was booked by the Raebareli police under IPC section 295A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage reli­gious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or reli­gious beliefs) on a complaint from the Hindu Yuva Vahini’s Raebareli district general secretary, Marut Tripathi.

Then in July 2023, Maurya sparked a new row by claiming that Badrinath Dham — one of the Char Dham, four major pilgrimage sites in Hinduism — was once a Buddhist mutt and the Hindu temple had been constructed by demolishing the mutt. He said that if the Archaeological Survey of India was surveying the premises of Varanasi’s Gyanvapi masjid to ascertain if it was built over the ruins of a Hindu temple, all Hindu pilgrimage sites should also be investigated.

Maurya’s comments invited severe criticism from not only from the UP BJP but also current and former chief ministers of Uttarakhand, and in August 2023, an advocate hurled a shoe at him during an SP event in Lucknow.

Two months later, Maurya remarked that India and Pakistan were separated not because of Jinnah but because the Hindu Mahasabha had demanded two separate nations. Earlier this year, Maurya quoted RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and the Supreme Court when he remarked that Hinduism was no religion but a way of life and also went on to call it a “hoax”.

While several SP leaders like Manoj Pandey, Tejnarayan Pandey and I.P. Singh had targeted Maurya over his remarks, party chief Yadav finally broke his silence in December last year when he advised party leaders not to make any comments on a religion or caste.

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Voices of support but no major shake-up

While Maurya’s resignation from the post of SP general secretary was followed by voices of support from the likes of former leader of the Opposition and SP leader Ram Govind Chaudhary and Pallavi Patel of SP ally Apna Dal (Kamerawadi), too, the support has been limited to public statements except for the resignation of SP state secretary Kamla Kant Gautam last Saturday. Gautam and a few other few leaders close to Maurya have since joined the newly floated RSSP.

A Maurya backer, Gautam had quit the BSP when the former left the party in 2016 and had floated his own outfit called the Bahujan Utthan Party (BUP). The BUP supported the SP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections before merging with the SP. Gautam, a former UP finance minister, has alleged that while his juniors were elevated to higher ranks in the party, his supporters were not given respect in the SP.