Mayawati likely to tour UP from Jan

Lucknow: Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) President Mayawati is likely to start touring Uttar Pradesh from next month to take stock of the preparations for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are the two states which Mayawati will oversee herself while in other states the party has either appointed in charges and coordinators or is in the process of doing so.

By touring the state, she hopes to get direct feedback from the party workers at the ground level.

“It will help the party chalk out a strategy for the upcoming general elections and also decide candidates for the elections. This may be a major shift in her electoral strategy from the previous two elections in UP — the 2022 Assembly elections and the 2023 urban local body polls — where she did not campaign much. The party fared poorly in both the elections,” said a party functionary.

He said that Mayawati had got an ‘overwhelming’ response in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana, where she held 20-odd rallies.

The four states faced Assembly elections recently and Mayawati was at the helm of her party’s campaign. Her presence, said sources, motivated the cadre.

“In UP, people in the party want to meet Behenji and receive guidance from her,” said sources.

In several party meetings that Mayawati has held of late, she has anticipated early Lok Sabha elections and asked partymen to be prepared for it.

As she tours the state, she will seek direct feedback from the partymen at the ground level.

Of late, there has been a growing discontent in the party over Mayawati being ‘cut off’ from the ground level workers and coordinators functioning as conduits between her and others in the party.

One of the biggest challenges that the party is facing in Uttar Pradesh is to not only win enough seats to be in the reckoning but also retain the ones that it has. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the party had won 10 seats of the 38 it contested in alliance with the Samajwadi Party.

In 2014, it drew a blank. In 2009, it had won 20 seats in UP.

The upcoming Lok Sabha elections will also be crucial for the BSP in the sense that it had registered its worst ever performance in UP in 2022 Assembly elections, winning only one seat and polling 12.8 per cent votes.