Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati on Sunday rejected the report on Saharanpur riots submitted to Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday, saying it was “a formality and the exact facts have not come out”.
At a press conference here, she said a BJP-SP nexus was behind the rise in communal violence in Uttar Pradesh.
She dismissed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day address as an “election speech.”
At the press conference, she inducted former Karnal Congress MP Arvind Sharma into the BSP and declared him the party’s chief ministerial candidate in Haryana. “He has been in touch with us for long and understands our ideology and functioning,” she said. Mr. Sharma said he decided to leave the Congress as he was getting “suffocated” in its Haryana unit.
Asked if she would contest the byelection in any of the 33 Assembly seats, including 11 in Uttar Pradesh, she said: “Whether Lok Sabha or Assembly, we do not contest any byelection; we’d rather strengthen our party on the ground and prepare to face the upcoming elections in the four States.”
