Lucknow: Ousted from power in Uttar Pradesh after losing the 2012 assembly elections and fairly marginalised in national politics, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati has already donned the battle fatigues, fine-tuning a two-pronged strategy for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
On a three-day “unusually long” stay in the state capital, the former chief minister is working overtime and relentlessly, party insiders say, to “ensure that her arch rival, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s (ruling) Samajwadi Party (SP), is defeated at the hustings”.
“Behenji (Mayawati) is very focused on her aim of taking the ‘sarva samaaj’ (people at large) along and winning the maximum seats for the BSP in the Lok Sabha polls,” senior party leader and close confidante Naseemuddin Siddiqui told IANS.
He said that even as other parties struggle to mobilise their organisational structure, the Dalit leader is well ahead with her preparations, having finalised almost all candidates for the parliamentary polls.
With a hostile government in her home state and a “not too caring” government in Delhi, the BSP supremo has drawn her strategy to take on the SP and the Congress.
While she has asked party cadres to mobilise support for the BSP by targeting the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s failure to check price rise, inflation and the frequent hikes in fuel prices, she has constituted a state panel to draft a chargesheet against the SP government, led by Mulayam Singh’s son Akhilesh Yadav.
“The state government has failed on every front and it will be our endeavour to ensure that this government’s inaction and misdeeds are thoroughly exposed by the party workers in the run up to the general elections,” said Swamy Prasad Maurya, leader of the opposition in the assembly.
Sources say that Mayawati has already okayed the blueprint of the “all-out offensive” against the SP government and this will soon be revealed to the press.
“We will then distribute these pamphlets and other documents to the common people to expose the Akhilesh Yadav government,” said a party insider, while adding that crime statistics are also being gathered to factually prove that the state is facing a ‘jungle raaj’ (jungle rule) under the SP government.
Mayawati has also asked senior party leaders to take the legal route against the state government in case other democratic means fail. She went into a huddle with legal luminaries within the party a few days back and directed Rajya Sabha MP and close confidante
S C Mishra to “knock the doors of the judiciary against the SP government in matters pertaining to public and social causes”. IANS
