Dear Express Reader Last week in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday, journalist Sidheeque Kappan walked out of Lucknow jail on bail, more than two years after he was arrested by the UP Police on his way to Hathras, where a Dalit woman had died after alleged gangrape. His was a prolonged incarceration after being charged under stringent laws like UAPA and PMLA, on apparently flimsy grounds. Granting him bail in the UAPA case, the Supreme Court inquired what exactly had been found against him, noting "the length of custody undergone"; giving him bail in the money laundering case, the High Court said that "except for allegations that Rs 5,000 was transferred in the bank account of co-accused… there is no other transaction, either in the bank account of the accused-applicant or in the bank account of co-accused". In the week that Kappan was released on bail, UP's Yogi Adityanath government was talking up its achievements on law and order ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Global Investors Summit on February 10-12. In this scenario, an Opposition leader in UP might legitimately put two and two together and come up with a question: How does a government that claims to have instituted the rule of law and made UP an investment-friendly destination, explain the prolonged incarceration of Kappan in which due process appears flouted? BSP chief Mayawati, the Opposition leader who is still widely credited with an impressive record on the law and order front in her terms as chief minister - the SP has very little credibility on the issue - did not connect those dots, or ask that question. Instead, last week, apart from perfunctory tweets on the Union Budget and the Adani affair, she took to social media most enthusiastically on the Ramcharitmanas controversy - ticking off SP chief Akhilesh Yadav for allegedly disrespecting Dalits and backward castes, and recalling her own humiliation at the hands of the SP in the 1995 Guest House incident in Lucknow. The Ramcharitmanas row began in Bihar this January, when the state's education minister, RJD's Chandrashekhar, called it a divisive text. Subsequently, SP's Swami Prasad Maurya stirred controversy in UP by saying that Tulsidas's epic contains "objectionable language" against women, Dalits, tribals and backward classes. In her tweets, Mayawati reacted to the SP calling the backward castes "Shudras" in its intervention on the matter, and not using the constitutional nomenclature of SC, ST, OBC. Essentially, she was rushing to counter what she sees as the SP's bid to use the controversy to encroach on the turf of the BSP. Taken together, Mayawati's agitation on the Ramcharitmanas row, including her bid to make it personal, and her silence on the Kappan case, tell a story about the self-imposed limits of empathy and imagination in a party that rose on the back of the largest and most radical of political promises - of assuring justice and representation for the voice-less and weak. In the last assembly election in UP, the BSP registered its worst-ever poll defeat, winning only one seat in the 403-member House and gathering only 12.8 per cent votes. Dalits constitute about 21 per cent of UP's electorate, and of them, Jatavs make up more than 50 per cent. So, in effect, even the BSP's core vote has shrunk to Jatavs within the Dalits, inaugurating a renewed competition with the SP and BJP for the non-Jatav Dalit and the non-Yadav OBC vote. Part of the reason for the BSP's narrowing is its evident unwillingness or inability, or both, to reach out, to take to the street or stake out a position on a wider range of issues in Parliament. Mayawati's party still rouses itself almost solely on narrowly defined "Dalit" issues, especially those where it can focus on personal slights to its icons and founders - for the rest, it mostly subsides into inertia and reticence. Of course, for the Dalit party, the tension between core and core-plus is real, the markers of identity and exclusion are so sharply defined. And yet, it is also true that Mayawati's hold over the Jatavs, if not Dalits, is still so unswerving that she could be said to be best placed to reach out beyond the faultlines. It is not that the BSP has not experimented with casting the net wider. Its so-called social engineering was seen to successfully woo the Brahmins earlier, and is reportedly addressing the Muslims now. Over the last many months, Behenji has spoken up increasingly on "Muslim" issues, be it the targeting of the community by the campaign of "love jihad" or by the government's bulldozer policy, or its survey of madrasas in the state. And yet, as her silence in the Kappan case shows once again, among the reasons that hold back Mayawati's party from growing into a larger version of itself, is its cramping of its own reach and stunting of its own ambition. It does so by turning away from the possibilities of broadening its agenda and plank, by forging more encompassing solidarities. Till next week, Vandita | 
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