Maya set to spread 'jaal '

BSP gears up for assembly polls in other states to pave Maya’s road to the PMO

LUCKNOW: The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is gearing up for perhaps the biggest challenge in its history spanning almost a quarter century - to make its presence felt in the assembly elections later this year. The state elections are virtually a do-or-die affair for the BSP, as party chief and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati nurtures grandiose plans to take over the reins of power in Delhi after the Lok Sabha elections.

“These elections are just a semi-final for us. Our main target is to see Behn ji (read: Mayawati) in the prime minister’s chair,” says UP BSP chief and Mayawati’s trusted lieutenant Swami Prasad Maurya.

“The people all over the country have seen how Behn ji has brought dalits, Muslims and upper castes together under one umbrella. We want to repeat this experiment in other states, too,” he says.

The BSP is targeting five of the six states - excluding Mizoram - where elections are to be held, and if sources in the party are to be believed, the party expects “amazing results” in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. “We may not have won many seats in 2003. But we have made our presence felt,” says Maurya. The statement is backed by statistics (see box).

The party would be putting up candidates in a large number of Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir, too. “But that is aimed more at keeping the national party image intact rather than gaining impressive electoral gains,” says a senior leader of the party insisting on anonymity. The Scheduled Caste (SC) votebank in these two states is numerically weaker compared to the other three states.

Party insiders say though the BSP’s public posturing revolves around the dalit-upper caste formula, Mayawati’s strategy is aimed at the 96 reserved seats in these five states. Also, the party is banking mainly on the large SC population in Rajasthan, Delhi (both 17%) and MP (15%), who form the base votebank of the BSP.

Another reason for the BSP to preen itself is its much better performance in the last election in these states compared to that of its arch rival in UP, the Samajwadi Party (SP). The only place where the SP did better was in MP where it got seven seats. However, here, too, the BSP got 10.61% vote while the SP got almost half (5.26%).
In Delhi, it is the BSP which is giving sleepless nights to Sheila Dikshit because the Congress strategists know whether it’s the Dalits or the upper castes, the BSP would be making a dent in the party’s traditional votebank here.

The Delhi CM would also not have forgotten the inroads BSP made into the national capital in the 2007 municipal elections, in which it cornered 9% of the vote share. Similarly, in MP and Rajasthan, the BSP would mostly be damaging the Congress.
g_deepak@dnaindia.net