Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati on Sunday raised doubts on the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) success in Mainpuri, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s victory in Rampur alleging ‘internal collusion’ between both the parties. ‘SP succeeded in the Mainpuri Parliamentary bypoll, but in the Rampur Assembly by-election, the SP’s defeat for the first time in Azam Khan’s seat due to planned low voting, was a matter of debate whether all this was not the result of the internal collusion of the SP and the BJP, wrote Ms. Mayawati on social networking site Twitter in Hindi.
The four-time Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister further asked the Muslim community to ponder over the question, so the community could be saved from being cheated in the upcoming elections. “ The BJP’s defeat in the Khatauli Assembly seat had also raised a lot of doubts, she added. In recent times, the BSP has been seen attacking the SP over various issues related to the Muslim community in what is believed to be an attempt to displace the Akhilesh Yadav-led party as the principal challenger of the BJP in U.P., through a Dalit-Muslim alliance.
The BSP, a Dalit-centric party, had not contested the bypolls in which the SP-led alliance emerged victorious on Mainpuri Lok Sabha and Khatauli Assembly seats. In Mainpuri, the SP nominee Dimple Yadav defeated the Saffron Party candidate Raghuraj Singh Shakya, by 2,88,461 votes. Ms. Yadav polled 6,18,120 votes against Mr. Shakya, who received 3,29,659 votes, while its ally the Rahtriya Lok Dal (RLD) candidate in Khatauli Madan Bhaiya, wrested the seat from the BJP by a margin of 22,054 votes. The RLD polled 97,139 votes while his nearest rival and BJP candidate Rajkumari Saini got only 74,996 votes. In Rampur, a seat came as a consolation prize for the BJP, as its candidate Akash Sexena defeated the SP nominee Asim Raja, by over 33,000 votes.
The BSP, once a prime political player in the electoral landscape of the State has been marginalised, with the BJP and the SP almost successful in converting U.P. into a bipolar polity. The Mayawati-led party which won a majority of its own in the 403-member U.P. Assembly during the 2007 polls, was successful in winning only one seat with a 12.8% vote share, its lowest in almost last three decades, during the 2022 Vidhan Sabha elections.
