Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati on Sunday declared her nephew Akash Anand as her political successor and asked him to take charge of all the states except Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Uttarakhand BSP president Shishpal Singh confirmed this outside the party headquarters in Lucknow following the party’s national convention, which was addressed by Mayawati.

“Behenji (Mayawati) has announced the name of Akash Anand as her successor
and told us to work with double the zeal we were working with in the past. We are soldiers of Behenji and follow her instructions blindly,” said Shishpal.

Udaiveer Singh, the BSP’s Saharanpur district president, said: “Our leader has made the name of her successor public. She has said Akash Anand would be her political heir. He will take care of party affairs in all the states except Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which Behenji herself would look after.”

Although Mayawati had indicated such a move by taking Akash, her brother Anand Kumar’s son, to every political programme and asking him to address party workers, Sunday was the first time she revealed her decision in front of her party leaders.

In 2017, she had appointed Anand as national vice-president of the party and in 2019 named him national coordinator.

“I am fit and able to run the BSP. I am not looking for a successor at the moment,” Mayawati had said at the time.

Akash, who is in his late 20s, has done his MBA from a college in London. He has his own office within the party headquarters where he meets BSP leaders almost every day.

Mayawati was also quoted as saying that any alliance with other parties had always harmed her party and that this was the reason she was being careful about rushing into a tie-up for the parliamentary elections of 2024.