Lucknow: After her party’s worst loss in the history of Uttar Pradesh with a mere 12.8% of the vote share, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati blamed the Muslim community and the media for the huge slump in votes and seats.
Speaking to media persons on Friday, Mayawati said, “In order to defeat the BJP, Muslims moved their votes from the tried and tested BSP to the SP. This wrong decision of theirs cost us badly because the fear spread among BSP supporters and 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 hard lesson for us because we trusted them. We will keep this experience in mind and change accordingly.”
“Lies like the BSP contesting elections not as strongly as the SP were also spread. This was widely publicized, while the truth is contrary because the BSP’s fight with the BJP is political as well as ideological,” she added, adding this also took away the anti-BJP Hindu votes, too, from her party.
The Mayawati-led party had contested all the 403 seats on its own but managed to win just one — Rasra in Maharajganj.
The BSP Chief on Saturday also accused the media of adopting a “casteist and hateful approach” towards the party and asked its spokesperson to boycott TV debates.
Her outburst came through a series of tweets two days after the BSP slumped to its lowest ever tally of seats in Uttar Pradesh, winning just one seat in the state polls.
She claimed the media adopted a “casteist, hateful and despicable approach” to “harm” the Ambedkarite BSP movement during the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls on the instructions of “their bosses”.
“Therefore, all the spokespersons of the party — Sudheendra Bhadauria, Dharamvir Choudhary, MH Khan, Faizan Khan and Seema Kushwaha — will no longer participate in TV debates etc,” she said in a tweet in Hindi.
“Had there been a triangular contest in Uttar Pradesh, then the results would have been as per the expectations of BSP. Then BJP could have been stopped from coming to power. In all, the Muslim community was with BSP but its vote went to SP,” she said.
Mayawati urged the leaders and workers of her party not to get bogged down with the results, but to learn from the defeat and take the party forward.
The BSP had fielded 97 Muslim nominees in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh polls while the SP had fielded 64 candidates from the minority community.
All the 36 winning Muslim candidates are from the Akhilesh Yadav-led party. Jailed Azam Khan, his son Abdullah Azam and Nahid Hasan from Kairana won on SP tickets. Muslims constitute around 20 per cent of the population in Uttar Pradesh.
With Agency inputs
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