Mayawati blames Muslims and Media for UP debacle

Lucknow, Mar 12: Reduced to a seat and a mere 12.8% of the vote share in the just concluded Assembly elections — the BSP’s worst-ever performance in Uttar Pradesh — party chief Mayawati said the decision by Muslims to throw their lot behind the Samajwadi Party (SP) resulted in Dalits, upper-caste Hindus and OBCs backing the BJP to keep out the SP’s “jungle raj”.

 

 

 

Speaking for the first time since Thursday’s results, Mayawati said, “To defeat the BJP, Muslims shifted their votes from the tried and tested BSP to the SP. This wrong decision of theirs cost us heavily because the fear spread among BSP supporters, the upper-caste Hindus and OBCs that if the SP comes to power, there will be jungle raj once again.

 

 

 

So they went to the BJP… This is a harsh lesson for us… that we trusted them… We will keep this experience in mind and change accordingly.” Insisting that Dalits, especially those from her Jatav community, “stayed like a rock” with the BSP, she said, “If the Muslim votes had got together with the Dalits, we could have repeated what happened in West Bengal, when the Trinamool defeated the BJP. Also, they forget the fact at the key moment — that only the BSP could have stopped the BJP from coming to power in UP… If there had been a three-way battle, as was expected, the BSP would have had very different results.”

 

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Thursday’s results mark a new low for the BSP, which contested all 403 seats. Even at its worst, the party never got less than 19% votes in the state. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when the party drew a blank, it still had a vote share of 19.77%. In the 2017 Assembly polls, when it won a mere 19 seats, the BSP’s vote share stood at 22.23%. It continued to remain in that zone when it tied up with the SP and contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, winning 10 seats. At her press conference on Friday, Mayawati alleged that a false narrative was created to pull down the BSP. “The casteist media put out fixed surveys and said negative things about us, which ended up deceiving people, especially Muslims and those against the BJP. A message was put out that the BSP is the BJP’s B-team when in reality the opposite is true because BSP’s fight with the BJP was political, electoral and one based on principles,” she said.