New Delhi: Sounding the death-knell for a possible mahagathabandhan in the upcoming assembly elections in four states, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Wednesday said that her party will “not fight the elections with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at any cost.”
The announcement puts to rest, for the time being, all speculation of a BSP-Congress alliance in the two states. She has already charted her alliance with the Ajit Jogi-led Chhattisgarh Janata Congress (CJC) in Chhattisgarh, meaning that the talks between the Congress and the BSP bore no fruit in any of these states.
Over the last one month, the BSP chief has given enough indications that she was upset with the Congress’s refusal to grant her party a “sammanjanak” (respectable) number of seats. Multiple reports indicated that while Mayawati had demanded 50 seats each in MP and Rajasthan as the price for forming an alliance, the Congress was unwilling to give her anything more than 35.
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Training her guns at the grand old party, the BSP leader said, “The Congress wants to go two steps ahead from even the BJP in destroying the BSP. It is because of the Congress’s attitude that the BJP has ruled for so long in states like Gujarat, MP and Chhattisgarh. If that’s not the case, why was the Congress being so stuck up about offering just a few seats to parties like BSP in elections to MP, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh? The question is whether the Congress wants to defeat the BJP…”
However, she provided an interesting twist to the tale when she quickly added that only Sonia Gandhi and the current Congress president Rahul Gandhi were open to ally with the BSP and respect its terms while the rest of the party’s leadership acted as roadblocks to the alliance.
This could very well mean that Mayawati has carefully kept her options open for the 2019 general elections, the run-up for which may see a renewed attempt by all to strike a grand opposition alliance against the BJP.
Taking a dig at the Congress’s state-level leadership, Mayawati said, “It is because of this attitude that we went with others in Karnataka and Chattisgarh.” She attacked the Congress leadership for its arrogance in MP and Rajasthan. “The Congress is in a very bad shape (in the two states), yet it believes it can fight the BJP alone,” she said, adding that the Rahul Gandhi-led party is is wrong to believe it can take on the BJP on its own.
Singling out senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh, she said, “It is very surprising that this leader of the Congress, who is a BJP agent, is giving TV interviews in which he has been falsely claiming that I am under the Central government’s pressure. The truth is that he has only been trying to sabotage the talks between the BSP and the Congress so that they do not reach an understanding.”
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“Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi both want that BSP and the Congress party to have a tie up for both the Vidhan Sabha and the Lok Sabha polls. But it’s sad that people like Digvijay Singh and others, who are scared of Central agencies like the CBI, do not want an electoral understanding between us at any cost.”
Singh has meanwhile dismissed Mayawati’s allegation of being a ‘BJP agent’ but did not explain why he commented on television that the BSP chief was under Modi government’s pressure while the talks between both the parties were under way.
“The truth is that the people are unwilling to forgive the Congress for their corrupt governments. There is an atmosphere of violence everywhere and misgovernance,” Mayawati said while speaking about the BJP’s regime and why her party wanted an alliance with the Congress.
She also said that while the BSP had always supported the Congress to keep the BJP away from the political field, the Congress had “only stabbed [the BSP] in the back.”
In a veiled attack on the Congress’s recent swing towards soft-Hindutva politics, she said the the party was scared of the BJP and it did not want to represent enough Muslims in the upcoming assembly polls as a result.
To stave the BJP off, she said, the BSP’s strategy will be to tie up with regional parties, which she thought were much better placed to do so.
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With the possibility of a BSP-Congress alliance gone, Mayawati will now look to partner with small regional players that have pockets of influence in the respective states. They could come in handy for the BSP, which, although a minor party, has its own strongholds. In the 2013 assembly polls, the party scored a little more than 6% of the vote share, electing four MLAs in the 230-member Madhya Pradesh assembly while it had around 3% votes with three out of a total 200 MLAs in Rajasthan.
With such a record, the Congress may have thought that the BSP was dispensable as far as state-level equations go. With the latest development, the BJP would surely draw confidence from the multiple contradictions that have frequently plagued the opposition parties, all of whom are trying to forge a ‘grand alliance’ ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls to take on the saffron party.
