Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati is gearing up for a larger role for herself and the party after the Lok Sabha election. She has addressed four rallies this week, days before the Lok Sabha polls are to start on April 11.
In her first rally in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, Mayawati stole the show with her frontal attack on the Congress and plain talk with the Muslims, asking them to vote en bloc for the alliance for defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh has already addressed rallies in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra and Telangana. Her rallies are scheduled in Karnataka, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu besides UP.
According to sources in the BSP, Mayawati is pitching for a larger role after the polls, probably to be a more acceptable person among contenders even for the top job.
Even as Mayawati is gearing up for a larger role after the Lok Sabha polls, her party’s graph has been sliding in UP. BSP bagged 27.42 per cent votes and 20 Lok Sabha seats in 2009. In 2014, its vote share declined to 19.82 per cent and it did not win a single seat in UP.
On reserved seats, where the BSP has its core voters, the party stood third in six out of 17 parliamentary constituencies in UP in 2014.
The BSP won only 19 out of 403 assembly seats in the 2017 UP elections – the vote share rising from 19.82 per cent in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to 22 per cent in the assembly polls. Recently, Mayawati was asked about her prime ministerial aspirations at a press meet and she said that as far as her becoming the prime minister was concerned, the elections were on and the results were awaited.
She said, “If we get a chance at the Centre, we will develop the country on the UP pattern. All of this is not new to me. I am a four-time chief minister of UP an I have the experience. When election results come out, we will see.”
This is not the first time that Mayawati has expressed her national ambitions or is contesting seats outside UP. In the last general election, BSP had contested all 503 Lok Sabha seats but failed to win a single one, not even in UP.
The BSP’s vote share was 4.19 per cent in the 2014 election at the national level, down from 6.17 per cent votes it polled in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls when it contested 500 seats and won 21 – 20 in UP and one in Madhya Pradesh.
The last time the BSP won in more than one state outside Uttar Pradesh in any national election was back in 1996, when the party won six seats in UP, two in MP and three in Punjab.
The sources in the BSP say that what is different this time is that Mayawati has stitched together pre-poll alliances – with Akhilesh Yadav in her state, actor-politician Pawan Kalyan’s Jan Sena in Andhra Pradesh, and the party of former chief minister Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh.