Playing the caste card with élan, four-time Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mayawati asked the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backwards Castes to unite and make Bahujan Samaj Party as a balance of power at the Centre post-lok Sabha election so that she could work for the welfare of ‘sarvsamaj’.
“All political parties, namely Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party and Samajwadi Party, have connived against the BSP to keep a ‘Dalit ki beti’ away from the post of prime minister. Expose their game plan and unitedly defeat the nefarious anti-Dalit designs of these parties,” Mayawati told the BSP workers at a massive Savdhan Rally held at Rama Bai Ambedkar Maidan that was bursting at its seam with the massive crowd.
Mayawati also asked Muslims not to allow division of their votes and support the BSP in the next lok Sabha election so that she could arrest the march of the BJP. She also clarified that the party would go alone in the next lok Sabha election.
The rally was appropriately called Savdhan Rally and Mayawati did caution the party workers against the game plan of Opposition parties. In her almost two-hour-long address, she talked about how others refused to take note of the BSP. She also spoke on the emergence of the BSP and how it captured national political scene when the party formed government of its own in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.
But the high point of Mayawati’s speech was her stress on ‘caste’ rather than her much publicised social engineering formula that catapulted the BSP to power when Dalits and Brahmins joined hands in Uttar Pradesh. This, despite the BSP giving 21 seats to Brahmins. Instead, Mayawati focused on how other parties got perturbed over the possibility of a Dalit ki beti becoming a PM.
“In the last election, all the parties were scared. “Kya hoga yedi Dalit ki beti PM ban gayeeIJ (What will happen if the daughter of a Dalit becomes prime ministerIJ). Therefore the parties entered into a tacit understanding against the BSP. Still we won 20 seats in 2009 election, and the party was second in 47 constituencies in UP. This shows how popular we were. The BSP managed to mark its presence despite collusion of Opposition parties,” Mayawati said.
The BSP supremo did not spare anyone. Mayawati talked about the policies of Congress, the BJP, Narendra Modi and even Aam Aadmi Party. But the maximum barbs were reserved for the Akhilesh Yadav Government when she said that in the Samajwadi Party rule, Uttar Pradesh had become a “criminal pradesh’ and demanded imposition of President’s rule in the state.
“Corruption and communal riots have increased. What happened in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli is like a wart on civilised society. The situation is yet to return to normal there. Dalits helped Muslims and Hindus alike in these riots and now they are the fulcrum in restoring peace there,” Mayawati said, giving a caste angle to the riots that left 69 dead and over 50,000 homeless.
“During my tenure, not a single communal riot was reported. The Ayodhya verdict was delivered during my tenure. Everything passed off peacefully. Instead of working for the welfare of people, this Samajwadi Party Government is content with changing names of projects and institutions named after Dalit leaders by my Government. Development has come to a halt. People are no longer getting unemployment allowance. Job opportunities have shrunk and people are helpless,” she said.
Targeting BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, she said that Modi was luring people by false promises. She said that her party would not allow a communal person accused in Godhra riots to become the PM.
“The recent decision of Modi to install a statue of Ballabh Bhai Patel is a political stunt to get the votes of a particular caste,” she said, adding that Modi was trying to implement the Gujarat agenda in the country.
Attacking the AAP, the BSP president said that the Delhi CM had backtracked from his decision to hold Janata Darshan and the promises made during elections were also being implemented in a haphazard manner and the AAP Government was now facing the wrath of people.
“The AAP Government would also fail to serve the people as those running it are incompetent,” she said, adding that power tariff and water tax in Uttar Pradesh during her 2007-12 regime was much more less than what AAP had promised to the people in Delhi.
Mayawati also did not spare the Congress. “The present UPA Government has failed to check corruption and inflation. Had the Congress fulfilled even 50 per cent of its poll manifesto during the past 60 years, the condition of the poor would have been different,” she said.
“If the BSP comes to power it would implement reservation in promotion and advocate reservation for poor among the upper caste in government jobs,” she added.
BSP workers from all over the state and neighbouring states of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan came in large numbers to attend the rally. The party had hired 19 pairs of trains and over 500 buses to ferry the supporters to the city.