Mayawati now says break-up not permanent, leaves BSP & SP workers confused

BSP chief Mayawati, however, insists her party will contest the bypolls alone even as SP's Akhilesh says he will now 'reflect deeply' on the development.

File photo of BSP supremo Mayawati and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav during a joint press conference in Lucknow | PTI

Lucknow: The five-month-long alliance between bitter rivals — the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) — is on a break, which is not a “permanent” one, BSP chief Mayawati announced Tuesday while reiterating that her party would contest the 11 assembly bypolls in the state alone.

The development has caused widespread confusion among workers in both parties, who are still reeling from the rout in the Lok Sabha elections.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav has still not got an official memo from Mayawati but maintains that he would “reflect deeply” on the parting of ways.

“If the alliance has broken or if these things have been put forth about the alliance, I will reflect on it very deeply,” he told the media in Ghazipur. “If the alliance does not exist in bypolls, then we will prepare to contest these elections on our own.”

Citing “political compulsions” for contesting the bypolls alone, Mayawati raised concerns over the defeat of SP candidates in Yadav bastions of Kannauj, Badaun and Firozabad where Akhilesh’s wife Dimple Yadav, cousins Dharmendra Yadav and Akshay Yadav were defeated by the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls.

“One cannot dismiss political compulsions. Unfortunately, SPs base vote and the Yadav community has not completely stood with SP in the recently Lok Sabha election results in UP,” Mayawati told ANI Tuesday. “This has forced us to reflect deeply about the future… Despite the coming together of BSP’s and SP’s base vote, these people should not have lost.”

Party workers left confused

Mayawati’s statement Tuesday was a re-iteration of what she had told her party leaders and workers in the three-hour-long review meeting held Monday — non-transferability of votes and the division of Yadav votes even in SP bastions had led to the defeat.

The BSP chief, however, added that since the alliance was forged, Akhilesh and his wife Dimple had given her a lot of respect, maintaining that “our relations are not for political gains and in future, too, they will continue”.

These developments have left workers of both parties in a state of confusion as they remain unsure of how the “break” will play out.

“This has probably been done to make the party cadre work on the ground so that they don’t become complacent,” said a local BSP leader in western UP who felt that the alliance would eventually still come together. “We will hold meetings with our workers after we get directives from the party and decide how to go about this.”

Workers and leaders from the SP, too, claimed to be waiting for their top leadership to decide the next course of action. As their wait continues, some SP leaders rejected claims about non-transferability of SP votes to BSP.

“One cannot generalise and say that our votes did not get transferred to them. It was the other way round. The BSP managed to win 10 seats after drawing a blank in 2014,” an SP leader said, on the condition of anonymity. “Had their votes transferred, we would have also increased our seats ten times.”

‘Not surprised by break-up’

Political analysts tracking UP expressed no surprise at the development. Maintaining that the alliance seemed to be “a short-lived experiment”, A.K. Verma, director of Centre for the Study of Society and Politics (CSSP), Kanpur, said, “They had come together on the common negative ground of opposing Modi — something which was not expected to work in this election. It was also clear that the votes will not be transferred to each other and the alliance won’t survive beyond the Lok Sabha polls.”

Verma further said that if Mayawati did well in bypolls, there would be no reason to have an alliance in the assembly election, adding that the foundation of the tie-up was flawed from the start.

“The bargain between the two parties was that Mayawati expected to be catapulted to the national level and she was prepared to cede the state domain to Akhilesh,” Verma said. “But the foundation of this bargain has collapsed since Mayawati is nowhere in national politics after the Lok Sabha election result.”