BSP to go it alone in Bihar

[1]

Seeking to make the Bahujan Samaj Party’s presence strongly felt in Bihar’s caste-driven politics and eyeing the forthcoming Assembly polls, Uttar Pradesh chief minister and BSP supremo Mayawati on Tuesday asked her party’s cadres to follow its UP socio-political formula to rise to power in the state ruled by the Nitish Kumar-led shaky NDA.

Addressing a conference of thousands of BSP workers and leaders gathered from four states — Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa — at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan, Ms Mayawati made it clear that the BSP would contest all the 243 Assembly seats in Bihar on its own in the November polls. She also said the BSP’s strategy would be to seek unity between the “Bahujan Samaj” and the poor among the upper castes in Bihar.
As Ms Mayawati spoke on a dais cooled by air-conditioners, her supporters listened to her in rapt attention braving the scorching summer heat. She also mounted scathing attacks on the Congress-led UPA government on price rise and the Maoist crisis, and ridiculed Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s initiatives to uplift the socio-economic conditions of the dalits. These initiatives were divisive and half-hearted, she said.
In a lengthy pep-talk to BSP workers on how to increase the party’s base and bring it to power in the four eastern states, Ms Mayawati said: “We are an ideology-driven party working for an equal society. Our cadres should spread the party’s ideology at the grassroots level to all sections of society.”
Starting with the 1990 Bihar Assembly polls, the BSP has had grand ambitions for this state neighbouring UP and sharing significant socio-political similarities.
The BSP currently has only five MLAs in the Bihar Assembly. It had fielded the largest number of candidates — 212 — in the 2005 Assembly polls. In the 200 Lok Sabha polls, BSP contested all the 40 seats Bihar on its own and failed to win a single seat, but its candidates stood second in 10 seats.
Ms Mayawati was presented with the statue of a large elephant perched on top of the model of the Parliament House, indicating surging hopes about the party’s rise to power at the Centre in future.