The Elusive Mayawati

It's advantage BJP as a struggle for survival leads the BSP chief to snub the Congress in three poll-bound Hindi heartland states

- Ajit Kumar Jha

If the photo-op in Karnataka in May or the Akhilesh YadavMayawati tie-up two months earlier was anything to go by, a mahagathbandhan or grand alliance of opposition parties was almost a given for three assembly polls in November and the general election in 2019. But then the mercurial May awati put a spanner in the works, aligning first with Ajit Jogi’s Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) and then ruling out an alliance with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. “In the interest of the BSP movement,” the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president declared, “it has been decided that the party will not ally with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at any cost. In Karnataka, we tied up with a regional party (Janata Dal-Secular). In Chhattisgarh, we tied up with Ajit Jogi’s Janta Congress Chhattisgarh. In Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, we may go with regional parties there, but certainly not with [the] Congress.”

Mayawati’s blistering attack on All India Congress Committee general secretary Digvijaya Singh, who she accused of being a “BJP agent” and held squarely responsible for the botched alliance talks between her party and the Congress in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, has stunned observers. The Congress, however, is clinging on to the hope that these are mere bargaining tactics by the BSP for a greater number of seats in any pre-poll alliance with the Congress in the three poll-bound states.

One indication of this came on October 9 when, celebrating BSP founder Kanshi Ram’s birth anniversary, she said, “We won’t go begging to any party for seats. We won’t tolerate the insult of our people. That’s why we have put forth only one condition, of being given a respectable number of seats to enter into an electoral alliance.”