BSP national convention: No alliance if not given fair share of seats to contest, says Mayawati

“We will tie up with a party only after getting a respectable number of seats, or else the party considers it better to contest alone,” she said at the BSP’s national convention in Lucknow.

Mayawati also made it clear that she would lead the BSP for the next 20 to 22 years and said that nobody needs to dream of becoming the party president.

She announced some amendments in the party constitution.

As per one of the key amendments, no family member or relative of the party’s national president can ever be an office-bearer in the organisation, and if the national president realises that he/she is not able to look after the field work due to old age, then he/she would be made party’s “national patron” with his/her agreement and the next national president would work according suggestions of the patron itself.

The BSP chief said: “I have implemented three important and hard decisions taken by Shri Kanshiram-ji with full honesty. However, on the third important decision, which is related to keeping family members away from active politics, after the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, on special request of the party people, I gave my younger brother Anand Kumar a position in the office to look after the paperwork. Unfortunately, the media started raising questions of nepotism in BSP, just like in the Congress and other parties.”

She said, “…Some selfish and opportunist people in the party (have) slowly started dreaming of pushing forward their family members. Some even started requesting me for that.”

Mayawati, who had appointed Anand Kumar as BSP’s vice-president in April last year, said Anand had requested her that he would work for the party without being a BSP office-bearer.

“This is why I took this matter seriously, and had to implement this hard decision, so that no opposition party or the media could accuse me of supporting nepotism like Congress and other parties,” she said.

Mawayati said that no close relative of the national president would ever be made to contest an election or be made a Rajya Sabha MP, MLC or a minister. However, under special circumstances, these conditions would not apply to family members of other office-bearers, she said.

During the convention, Mayawati, for the first time, announced posts of two national coordinators and gave Rajya Sabha MP Veer Singh and party national vice-president Jai Prakash Singh the responsibility. They will now look after functioning of the party organisation. Veer Singh was until now the BSP coordinator for Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Jai Prakash was the coordinator for Delhi and Rajasthan.

Former MLA R S Kushwaha was appointed the new BSP president for UP replacing Ram Achal Rajbhar, who was made the party’s national general secretary and in-charge of Bihar, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh.