With the Tamil Nadu and West Bengal election results raising the spectre of the “anti-incumbency” factor, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati assured her Bahujan Samaj Party workers on Friday that there would be no change in the list of candidates announced for the Assembly elections due next year.
“Those who have been denied ticket and others would be accommodated as MLCs, Rajya Sabha members and elected MPs,” she said at a function here to mark the completion of her four years in office.
Ms. Mayawati cautioned the workers against the “machinations” of the Opposition parties, which were “creating confusion over the distribution of ticket by the BSP.”
She pointed to the “step-motherly treatment and hostility” of the Congress-led UPA government to the BSP regime and the Opposition-sponsored “political conspiracy” to drive home her point that they must ensure that the BSP returned to power in 2012.
Highlighting her government's achievements, she said the State “turned over a new leaf on the law and order and development fronts and on the welfare of the poor and deprived sections… The BSP government's record in four years was better than the combined 40-year record of the other party governments in the State.”
To propagate the government's achievements, a film on the government's performance would be aired by TV channels from Saturday.
In the past four years, Ms. Mayawati said, the State's share in the Union government's allocation of funds had not been given on time. She pointed to schemes for which the Centre's allocation or approval had been withheld or delayed.
Dubbing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's announcement of schemes for Bundelkhand at a rally in Banda on April 30 a “political drama,” she said it was an open secret that Bundelkhand's backwardness was not a recent phenomenon; it had remained backward since independence.
She condemned the Centre's silence over the Rs.80,000-crore special incentive package her government had sought for the development of Bundelkhand and Purvanchal.
Ms. Mayawati blamed Uttar Pradesh's backwardness on the “political conspiracy” hatched by the Opposition parties for “political gains.”
Rubbishing social activist Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption, Ms. Mayawati alleged that some civil society members were being backed by certain political parties with a distinct anti-Dalit slant. The BSP would stage a dharna nationwide to expose them.
“Fake and malicious”
Referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party's booklet on the alleged 100 scams of the BSP government, she said it was a fake and malicious publication containing just lies. “But then, the BJP excels in spreading lies and canards.”
