New Delhi: Mayawati, former chief minister of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, wants to be the next prime minister of India.
Addressing her first public rally after being ousted from power in March 2012, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo, who turned 58 on Wednesday, said that aim of her party is to get majority on its own in the next Lok Sabha.
Mayawati virtually launched her party’s campaign for the upcoming general elections by addressing a rally in the Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow. On earlier occasions, Mayawati accepted birthday gifts of garlands made of currency notes. But this rally had a distinct impact of the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on the national scene. The obnoxious display of wealth was done away with.
The BSP though explained that the sombre mood was due to the recent communal riots in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, in which 60 people were killed and more than 40,000 forced to take shelter in refugee camps.
People at the rally were made to sit on the ground and Mayawati explained: “If we had hired chairs for all of you, the expenditure would have been much more”.
She ruled out any pre-election alliance with the ruling Congress and lashed out against it and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as also the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) with equal disdain “as communal forces”.
The BSP had won 21 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats of in the state in 2009 general elections. It is under the impression that the September communal riots in the state has changed political equations and made her party the hot favourite.
She attacked all the three political rivals and explained her formula to emerge victorious in the April-May Lok Sabha elections. “We have to unite all Dalits [lower caste Hindus] throughout the country. Then we have to get on board Muslims and upper caste [Hindus]. The BSP’s policy has to be brotherhood,” Mayawati said.
The Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government survived the past two years with outside support of the SP and BSP after being reduced to the minority. The Congress hoped to forge a pre-poll alliance with the BSP.
The BSP, however, felt that joining hands with the Congress party, whose popularity is on the decline, would not be in favour of it.
“We have to be prepared for a direct fight. It is important to take strong steps against casteist agenda of these parties. We also have to unite people of upper caste who are fed up of the Congress, the BJP and the SP,” Mayawati said.
“The people of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli have not been able to come up from their loss. The central government should have placed the state under President’s rule and work to build communal harmony in the area. But the BJP, Congress and SP are playing communal politics,” she alleged.
She also accused both the BJP and the Congress of misusing the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as a tool to harass her for nine years. “The BJP misused the CBI to pressurise the BSP in 2003 to forge an alliance at the national level,” she alleged. The corruption charges against her were dropped in August last year and the Supreme Court asked the CBI to stop its investigations.
Mayawati, a government school teacher until she joined politics, is considered one of the richest politicians of India and has faced several allegations of corruption. The CBI was investigating charges of amassing wealth beyond her known sources of income and corruption allegation in the aborted Taj corridor case. Her rule between 2007 and 2012 in Uttar Pradesh was marked by charges of rampant corruption, paving the way for massive victory of the SP.
That did not stop her from criticising the incumbent Akhilesh Yadav government for indulging in corruptions and breakdown of law and order situation in the state. “Uttar Pradesh has become Crime Pradesh (state),” Mayawati said.
