Five years after their bitter break up following a poor show in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) are trading barbs over who parted ways while accusing each other of going incommunicado. The war of words was triggered after BSP chief Mayawati in a 59-page booklet shared her “unpleasant experience” of the alliance with the SP. “To stop the BJP in 2019, Akhilesh asked me to forget the SP’s past ‘misdeeds’ and sought another chance. The BSP won 10 seats while the SP could manage only five,” she wrote in the document. The BSP chief claimed that the SP chief was so upset with the 2019 results that he had stopped responding to her phone calls. “Following this, while maintaining its self-respect, the party parted ways with the SP,” she added. Responding to Mayawati, Akhilesh on Thursday said people say such things sometimes to cover up their faults. “I was on stage in Azamgarh along with other SP and BSP leaders when the alliance was called off. No one had a clue this was coming. I had myself called up Mayawati to know why the alliance was being broken,” he said. In a post on X, the BSP chief on Friday responded to Akhilesh saying the BSP had made a lot of efforts to maintain the alliance with the SP in 1993 as well as in 2019 but the “interest of the Bahujan Samaj” was paramount. On Saturday, the SP chief said he hoped that the SP-BSP alliance would change the politics of the country and recalled how a senior BSP leader at the time told him that he had been “cheated”. “I asked a very senior BSP leader, who was with me on the stage when the news of the alliance breaking came in, about what more could we do. He replied: ‘hume bhi aisa dhokha mila tha, aapko bhi mil gaya (We also were cheated and now you have been)’,” he said. BSP general secretary Satish Chandra Misra blamed the SP chief for breaking the alliance and not responding to Mayawati’s phone calls. “Behen ji herself tried to speak to Akhilesh while phone calls were made even from the party office but he did not respond. Hence, the BSP had to break the alliance as his behaviour was hurting the self-respect of Dalits and other deprived sections of society,” he said in a post on X in Hindi. The SP and BSP, along with Jayant Chaudhary-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) – under the Mahagathbandhan banner – had contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls together. While the SP contested 37 seats, the BSP and the RLD contested 38 and 3 seats respectively. Since snapping ties, the fortunes of the SP and BSP have moved in opposite trajectories. While the SP – which contested in alliance with the Congress under the INDIA bloc – registered its best-ever performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls, winning 37 of the state’s 80 seats, the BSP witnessed its worst showing and drew a blank. Though Congress leaders claim that they drew Dalit votes towards the INDIA bloc, SP leaders feel things have changed since the unravelling of the alliance in 2019. A section of the party leaders feels that Dalits now see the SP as an alternative as it has many former BSP leaders – three former state presidents and 13 of its 37 MPs – in its ranks. Even as the BSP, sources said, is attempting to unite its vote base against the SP by alleging disrespect of Dalit leaders, SP leaders feel the presence of many former BSP bigwigs in their fold will make it difficult for Mayawati to convince voters.
