The Congress’s overtures to Mayawati for a pre-poll alliance in Uttar Pradesh were thwarted on Wednesday, with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief refusing to meet a four-member delegation that returned from her door after an hour-long wait.
Sources said Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had asked Barabanki MP Tanuj Puniya, the party’s SC cell president Rajendra Pal Gautam and two other leaders to meet Mayawati on Tuesday. Puniya is a Dalit.
“The leaders were constantly in touch with Mayawati’s office before visiting her residence in Lucknow on Tuesday afternoon. We don’t know what happened at the eleventh hour that she refused to meet our leaders after keeping them waiting for about an hour,” said a Congress leader who didn’t want to be named.
“She is a leader of the Dalit community and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. It is our responsibility to meet her and ask about her well-being. Her staff at the gate noted our names in a register. We’ll meet her whenever she calls us,” Gautam said without divulging any details.
Earlier, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav had sent feelers to the BSP chief on an alliance, but she had said any such pre-poll understanding would be detrimental to her party.
“We have done pre-poll alliance with many parties in the past. It led to the other parties getting our votes, but we didn’t get their (communities who traditionally vote for those parties) votes,” she had said recently.
However, the statement is not fully true. While currently the BSP has no member in the Lok Sabha, its 10 MPs were elected in 2019, when the party contested the polls in alliance with the SP. The BSP had failed to win any seat in the 2014 elections.
Mayawati said the BSP had secured 19.6 per cent votes in Uttar Pradesh in 2014, which came down to 19.3 per cent in 2019. But the party got 9.24 per cent of the votes in the state in 2024 when it went solo.
She became the chief minister for the first time in 1995 with the support of the SP
and in 1997 and 2002 with the BJP’s help.
In 2007, Mayawati became the chief minister after the BSP secured an absolute majority in the Assembly elections by successfully forging a caste alliance between Dalits and Brahmins, which was reflected in the selection of candidates. She is trying to recreate a similar social alliance for the 2027 polls and has said that her focus will be on the poor upper castes and Muslims.
However, a section of political observers believes that she has a tacit understanding with the BJP to keep other parties at bay because she wants to keep Prime Minister Narendra Modi in good humour.