No pre-poll tie-up with any party for UP polls — Mayawati

“BSP won the maximum number of zila parishad seats last month. Moreover, no other party’s vote bank is transferable like the BSP’s. So, any electoral alliance benefits our partner much more than it helps us,” Mayawati told The Indian Express.

She claims to have rejected the BJP’s overtures for a tie-up saying: “kaath ki haandi to sirf eh bar chadti hai. Hamne to repair karke do bar chadai” (Wooden pot can’t be put on fire twice. We tried it twice by tying up with BJP even after being ditched once).

Didn’t she have a good rapport with top BJP leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani? She hesitates before saying: “They may be good people but they are all members of the same manuvadi party. Our fight is against an ideology and individuals like Atal, Advani, Kalraj Mishra and Lalji Tandon do not matter to us.”

Going by the fragile coalition fabricated by the BJP in the state, the BSP is ready to face elections anytime now. Mayawati says this was the reason she had already appointed office-bearers not only at the level of Assembly constituencies, as most parties do, but even at the level of polling booths in most of the constituencies.

She claims that her party had outgrown its Dalit party image as out of its 14 Lok Sabha MPs, only five were from the Scheduled Castes while four belonged to backward castes, three were Muslims and remaining two were from the upper castes. In the 1998 elections, the BSP had managed to get only four MPs elected to the Lok Sabha.

The fact that BSP’s well-known Muslims candidates like former Union Minister Arif Mohammad Khan and Akbar Ahmad Dumpy lost in the 1999 elections while lesser-known Muslim candidates managed to win, shows the party’s clout in the community, she says.

But wasn’t the BSP practising blatant casteism? Mayawati shrugs at such allegations: “We ourselves are victims of age-old casteism. How can we promote it? We want to eradicate casteism altogether.

Coming back to UP politics, what did she feel about former Chief Minister Kalyan Singh who has floated a new party and even got an MLA elected in a by-poll? “Politically, he is almost finished. But if he grows stronger he will only weaken the BJP, thereby benefitting the BSP,” she says.

Mayawati does not spell out which party she regarded as the BSP’s main rival. “They all have considerably weakened and are in a state of disarray. So none of them is my principal rival,” she says.

BJP is facing deep factionalism, so is the Congress and Mulayam Singh’s attempts to promote his son are causing anguish to Samajwadi Party leaders, she adds.