Mayawati after loss: Sore loser or soothsayer?

Blames everybody other than herself, stokes fears of goonda raj by SP

GN Bureau | March 7, 2012



Hours after resigning as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Bahujan Samaj Party chief minister Mayawati blamed everybody and everything but her misgovernance for the her defeat in the recently concluded state elections at a press conference in Lucknow.

She took the brazeness a step further saying that her government had delivered good governance despite the opposition's machinations to derail the delivery. She also lashed out at the union government saying that UPA 2 had behaved akin to the state opposition when it came to aiding UP in development.

The outgoing chief minister offered her own analysis of the votes polled saying that Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party benefitted from Muslim, OBC and forward caste electorates as the Congress and BJP failed to instill confidence in them.

Mayawati sought to stoke the fears of lawlessness or "goonda raj" that has been, since long associated with the previous Samajwadi Party regime in the state. She said that the forward castes and Muslim voters who had voted for the party already had reasons to worry, referring to incidents of violence that occurred after the results were announced.

Singling out the forward caste and Muslim voters, she added that they will soon rue having voted SP into power. Blaming the media for abetting an anti-BSP wave in the state, Maywati said that the people of UP will blame them along with the Congress and BJP for aiding SP’s rise.

She claimed that the state had elected a party into power which would put all "development works initiated by her government in the cold sack."

However, she thanked her traditional votebank, the dalits, saying that they had not moved an inch from the sarvjan hiteya (prosperity for all) agenda of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Significantly, she thanked the few forward caste and Muslim voters who had sided with BSP.

The mercurial Dalit leader hinted at reforms within her party saying that the party will now try and include all sections — Muslims, OBCs, forward castes — in the cadres. It might be return to the social engineering of 2007 but at a more fundamental level.

 

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