New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh rivals Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on Tuesday cracked down on junior leaders within their ranks following disastrous performances in the just concluded Lok Sabha elections.
Riding on the strong Narendra Modi wave, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had won merely 10 seats from India’s most populous and politically crucial state in 2009, won 71 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats while its regional ally Apna Dal won two.
The Samajwadi Party, which won 22 seats in 2009, ended up winning just five seats this time while the Congress party that had won 21 seats got only two. The BSP faced a complete whitewash with the party failing to retain any of the 20 seats it had won in the last Lok Sabha polls. The BSP’s worst-ever show may soon threaten its status as a national party as it goes unrepresented in the new Lok Sabha.
BSP president and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati yesterday announced dissolution of all committees of the party from booth level to the state level following a meeting of party office bearers in the state capital Lucknow.
The party accused them of giving false feedback to the senior party leadership about their preparedness and prospects.
Party coordinators would also be changed as Mayawati is said to be angry with the leaders, who had no answer for the party’s poor showing when asked for an explanation.
The BSP supremo intends to restructure the party and undertake a complete ovehaul, with an eye on the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
Having lost power to SP in 2012 assembly polls, followed by this total rout in the Lok Sabha polls, the BSP’s future now rests on an improved show in the next assembly elections.
What has irked Mayawati the most is that the party’s traditional Dalit (lower caste Hindu) voters deserted this time to vote for the BJP.
The Samajwadi Party on the other hand stripped 36 leaders who enjoyed junior ministers’ salaries and perks as heads of various state bodies.
The party had rewarded its leaders who could not be accommodated in the council of ministers by giving 88 of them the rank of Minister of State as heads of various bodies.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav yesterday announced the decision to strip them of the ministerial privileges for allegedly working against the interest of the party.
Yadav, however, evaded questions if he would take the moral responsibility of the party’s poor show and follow the neighbouring Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar who quit from the post after his Janata Dal (United) party managed to win just two of the 40 seats from the state. Yadav just said that one cannot compare Uttar Pradesh’s political situation with that in any other state.
What makes Uttar Pradesh unique is that all seven seats won by non-BJP parties went to political dynasties. The mother-son duo of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were the only two winners from the Congress party, all five seats that went to the Samajwadi Party were won by the Yadav family.
Akhilesh Yadav’s father and SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav won both seats he contested, while the chief minister’s wife and two cousins were the other three winners.
Yadav who during electioneering said that the Modi wave was not blowing in Uttar Pradesh had a tough time evading questions about his party’s poor outing. He merely said that his government would have a good working relationship with the Narendra Modi government at the centre once Modi is sworn in as the new Indian prime minister on Monday.