Bahujan Samaj Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati has expelled her nephew Akash Anand again. This is the third time in two years she has taken away the national coordinator’s charge, and the second time she has cancelled his primary membership. In May 2024, she removed him after a speech case in Sitapur during the Lok Sabha campaign.
In June, she brought him back and named him her political successor. In March 2025, she expelled him, blaming the influence of his father-in-law Ashok Siddharth, a former Rajya Sabha member she had already shown the door. Forty-one days later, after a public apology, she restored Akash. On September 3, 2026, she stripped him of the coordinator’s post once more. On September 10, she expelled him altogether.
Siddharth had announced his retirement from politics after her ultimatum, but she said the gesture came too late. She also said Akash had not shown loyalty in the way she demanded. The firebrand, who once ruled Lucknow, now watches her party shrink.
The Dalit vote in Uttar Pradesh has already shifted, broken, and divided among the Samajwadi Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and smaller claimants. Yet, this is not only a story of the BSP’s decline or of a family quarrel that keeps returning to the same table.
Mamata And Abhishek
East of that broken landscape stands another firebrand woman, Mamata Banerjee, founder of the Trinamool Congress and former chief minister of West Bengal, a street fighter who built a party with her own name. Her nephew Abhishek Banerjee has lived for years at the centre of discussion, scrutiny, and now a continuous run of probes by the new BJP government.
After the assembly results of May 4, 2026, when the BJP won 207 seats and the TMC was reduced to 80, the party tore itself apart. Suvendu Adhikari, once of the TMC, became Chief Minister and defeated Mamata in Bhabanipur.
Within days, senior leaders turned on Abhishek. Madan Mitra, Anubrata Mondal, Ritabrata Banerjee, Sandipan Saha, and others blamed him for high-handedness, for the grip of consultants, for tickets, and for the standing ovation Mamata demanded for him two days after defeat. Most of the legislature walked away.
A majority of MLAs refused the leadership’s choice for Leader of Opposition. Allegations of forged signatures followed. FIR followed FIR against Abhishek: soil excavation in Diamond Harbour, Amphan relief, diagnostic camps, inflammatory campaign remarks, and civic notices on properties. Agencies questioned him for hours. Mamata never left his side. She said he had fought like a tiger. The party still fractured around him.
Women And Dynastic Politics
The stories of Akash and Abhishek are not merely the stories of two nephews; they are chapters in a politics that has long been male. That fact has never meant the absence of women who fight in the open. Mayawati and Mamata rose without husbands or sons to lean on.
They built organisations with their own scars and their own crowds. Indian politics still treats succession as a family affair. Almost every major leader has wanted a dynasty. A son, sometimes a daughter, inherits the microphone.
The Congress has moved from Motilal Nehru to Jawaharlal to Indira to Rajiv to Sonia to Rahul Gandhi, with Priyanka Gandhi Vadra now carrying the same surname into another generation.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which often speaks against dynasty, has lived with its own lines: the Scindias, local satraps who push sons into tickets, and families that survive every ideological sermon. Power likes a surname because a surname feels safer than an open contest.
For Mayawati and Mamata, both unmarried, the choice was narrower. To keep the party inside the family, they chose nephews. The choice exposes a larger crisis in women’s politics. If a woman also wishes to be a dynast, and if she has no child of her own, what remains for her to leave? The question is not one of victimhood; it is a question about how power in India has actually travelled, from household to household, from blood to blood, even when the person at the top is a woman who once stood alone.
The Nephew Conundrum
Akash’s political career never quite took off. He tried, in his own loud way, with speeches and tours and the title of successor. There is little chance it will take off now. Abhishek was powerful and, in some measure, still is. Somewhere this shows that appointment alone does not work.
Public office, the real extent of power, and personal charisma decide the rest. For Akash, the questions will remain whether he was deserving at all, whether he really failed, and whose failure it would then be, Mayawati’s or his? For Abhishek, Mamata knows that power has spoilt him in some way. The choice of him helped destroy the party as it stood.
Today’s BJP Chief Minister left the TMC years ago. Many who stayed later said they left because of the nephew. Somewhere the loneliness of the two dynasts, the two nephews, may be the same.
Indian politics cannot stay stuck at dynastic choices. The choice should be a leader, not a blood relation. Until that happens, aunts will keep looking at nephews, and the parties they built will keep fracturing in the same old light, one family quarrel at a time.
Sayantan Ghosh is the author of two books, Battleground Bengal and The Aam Aadmi Party, and teaches at St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata.
