A day after Mayawati claimed that the Rajya Sabha defeat of the Bahujan Samaj Party candidate would not affect her party’s alliance with Samajwadi Party, SP vice-president Kironmoy Nanda said that the Bharatiya Janata Party would be reduced to pre-2014 position in UP once the BSP and the SP contest elections together.
“It is a matter of time when the BJP bubble will burst in Uttar Pradesh. The next general election will be the requiem for the saffron party in the state. The BSP and SP have decided to go together and this alliance will reach a definite conclusion,” Nanda told ‘The Pioneer’ over telephone.
The SP leader said that the response that the alliance was getting from across the political spectrum was overwhelming.
“This alliance has given a new hope of stitching an anti-BJP alliance in the country. The BJP will be reduced to non-entity in UP after 2019 polls,” he said.
“We need to take care of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. If we succeed in this, everything will fall in place in no time. In UP, we are heading towards a powerful alliance while in Bihar, the party of laluji (lalu Prasad Yadav) is already on a strong footing,” said Nanda, who met Rashtriya Janata Dal leader in Ranchi on Saturday evening.
Predicting a sure shot defeat of the BJP in 2019 elections, the SP leader said that the way the BJP had lost almost all parliamentary by-elections recently was a strong indicator of anti-BJP sentiment building up among the people across India.
“The defeat of BJP in Gorakhpur and Phulpur is no small victory for the BSP-SP alliance. Its importance can be gauged from the fact that one of these seats was vacated by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and was a BJP bastion for years while the other, Phulpur, was vacated by Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya. If the Chief Minister and his deputy failed to retain their seats, one can understand what will happen to the other 71 MPs,” the SP leader said.
The BJP and its allies had won 73 out of 80 lok Sabha seats in the 2014 parliamentary elections in UP. The Congress won Amethi and Rae Bareli while the SP won five seats. After the bypoll results, SP’s tally in the lok Sabha has gone up to seven.
Nanda admitted that nitty-gritty of the alliance had to be worked out but said that in 2019 elections, the BSP and the SP would share seats among themselves while Congress would be allowed to contest where it was powerful.
He even said that the SP was ready for an early election as there was a possibility that Prime Minister Narendra Modi may go for early election, probably in the end of 2018.
What made SP leaders confident about the alliance was the statement of Mayawati, who categorically claimed that the alliance between SP and BSP would continue.
Mayawati’s statement has belied the prediction of political pundits who had prophesied that if the BSP candidate failed to win the Rajya Sabha seat, it would be the requiem for the alliance. Instead, indications are that it would go stronger.