Mayawati pitches for ‘majboor’ government, says BSP will go it alone for Lok Sabha polls

Mayawati added that the BSP can have alliances with regional parties in Punjab and Haryana but on condition that these parties should have no connection with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) or the Congress-led INDIA alliance of Opposition parties.

She also said that the intentions and policies of the governments of BJP and Congress-led alliances had effectively been almost similar for Dalits, tribals, the poor, backward communities, Muslims and other religious minorities.

She said the BSP has maintained distance from the NDA and the Congress-led Opposition alliance because both the BJP and Congress only made false claims about the welfare of the poor and weaker sections and did nothing substantial for them.

Mayawati added that there was no difference between the BJP’s “kathni aur karni (what they say and what they do), just like the Congress.

The BSP has made pre-poll alliances in UP on three occasions in the past. The first time it had struck an alliance was with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in the 1993 UP Assembly polls. SP had contested on 256 seats and won 109 of them, while the BSP had contested on 164 seats and won 67. The BJP had won maximum 177 seats. But the SP and the BSP, with the support of the Congress, had formed the government and SP’s Mulayam Singh Yadav had become Chief Minister. But Mayawati decided to withdraw support from the Mulayam government on June 2, 1995, after a series of conflicts between the SP and BSP over various decisions of the Mulayam government. At the time, the BJP had extended support to the BSP, and Mayawati took oath as CM, although the alliance government lasted only four months.

The BSP next made an alliance with the Congress for the 1996 UP polls. It had contested on 296 seats and won 67, whereas the Congress won 33 out of its quota of 126 seats. The alliance was scuttled after the elections.

The next pre-poll alliance the BSP made was again with the SP for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. BSP contested on 38 seats and won 10 while SP contested on 37 seats and won five. A month after the results, Mayawati snapped ties with the SP, saying her party would contest future elections on its own. Mayawati had then said that SP’s core voters, the Yadavs, had drifted away from the alliance, even in SP strongholds. The claim is based on the fact that in five seats where the SP had fielded Yadav candidates (Jhansi, Kannauj, Mainpuri, Badaun and Firozabad), its vote count was less than half the combined votes that had been polled by the SP and BSP candidates in 2014.

Besides pre-poll alliances, the BSP has also struck post-poll alliances in UP, with the BJP helping BSP president Mayawati form government in UP on all three occasions. The BJP first helped Mayawati form a government with its support in 1995. In 1997,Mayawati became the CM for a second time with the help of the BJP. Again, 2002 saw the formation of a BJP-BSP government headed by Mayawati.