With just over a week to go before the results of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are announced, some bureaucrats appear to have decided to please Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati.

Why else would the Lucknow Development Authority deploy contractors to clean all the monuments of Dalit icons constructed in the city during her rule between 2007 and 2012?

These include Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, Dr Ambedkar Vihar, Samajik Parivartan Pratik Sthal, Manywar Kanshi Ramji Smarak Sthal, Manyawar Kanshiram Ji Harit Park, Buddha Vihar, Shanti Upvan and Smriti Upvan. (PTI picture shows workers cleaning Mayawati’s and Kanshi Ram’s statues at the Parivartan Pratik Sthal.)

“The LDA didn’t maintain these monuments for the last five years. We used to complain to the authorities but they didn’t listen to us all these years. We know why they are cleaning these structures when only a week is left for results,” a close associate of Mayawati said on Friday.  

Some bureaucrats are also being spotted near Mayawati’s Mall Avenue home after five years.

LDA officers refused to comment on the cleanliness drive. But one official said on condition of anonymity that they have been doing this at the end of every financial year to exhaust the budget. The Mayawati government had in 2010 passed a bill to earmark Rs 250 crore annually for the maintenance of these monuments.

Roundly criticised before the last election for installing statues of herself and her party symbol – the elephant, the BSP chief has been promising at campaign rallies this time that she will not build any more memorials. “I have already got constructed all the memorials. If given an opportunity, this time I would focus on development and law and order,” she says. 

But on Friday,  she took on chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for mocking the monuments.

“Both have been campaigning free of cost for the stone structures of the BSP icons,” she said in Mirzapur, where Modi had spoken an hour earlier and attacked her over the statues.

“The Babua (toddler) of the SP had first started publicising the elephant, the election symbol of the BSP. Now the Prime Minister is following him,” she said.

Report by Piyush Srivastava