BSP president Mayawati Friday asked party cadres to reach out to the OBC community across the state, to expose the BJP’s “conspiracy to delay local body elections”.
Sources in the party said the outreach programme will be run till the local body elections are announced in the state, with the OBC quota.
On Wednesday, the Allahabad High Court ordered the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh to conduct the civic elections while scrapping its provision of OBC quota for the same, saying it had not met the conditions for the same. The Yogi Adityanath government has approached the Supreme Court challenging the order.
On Friday, Mayawati held a meeting in Lucknow with party functionaries from across UP and Uttarakhand, to review party preparations, including for the local elections.
A BSP leader said: “Party workers will expose the anti-reservation mindset of the BJP and other parties like the Samajwadi Party and Congress. Mandal units will tour booths and hold small meetings for one-to-one interactions with OBCs. Each functionary will hold one to four such booth meetings every day. This will expose the BJP government’s strategy behind delaying civic polls and also prepare the BSP for the local body elections.”
Apart from urban areas where local body elections will be held, the BSP workers will also fan out to rural regions to reach out to OBC voters.
This is the BSP’s biggest such outreach to OBCs in a long time. In the past few years, various BSP leaders belonging to the OBC Maurya, Kushwaha, Rajbhar and Saini communities, including those who had held senior posts in the party, have left and joined the BJP and SP.
The earlier influx of OBCs had followed the BSP’s social engineering policy, targeting other castes apart from its Dalit vote bank and Muslims.
At the party meeting Friday, Mayawati attacked the BJP and said that if it had intentions of conducting urban local body
elections in UP as per the law and on time, it would have focused on meeting the conditions demanded by the Supreme Court “instead of wasting time and energy on implementing the Sangh’s appeasement agenda of religious conversions and madrasa survey”.
Calling the BJP a “sampradaik vivaad party (party of communal conflicts)” with its claims of religious conversions, love jihad and hate jihad and steps such as madrasa survey, she said it had also become a party of “seema vivad (border dispute)”, citing the ongoing dispute between the BJP-ruled Karnataka and Maharashtra. She asked the BJP to instead focus on the China border dispute.
Apart from the BJP, Mayawati attacked the Congress for being “anti-reservation”. “Both the parties together first made the constitutional right of reservation to SCs and STs ineffective and now the same behaviour is being done when it comes to reservation for OBCs. Because of their casteist and hateful behaviour, posts reserved for these categories in the government departments have been lying vacant for years,” she said.
The BSP chief also attacked “the mindset, policy and intentions of the Samajwadi Party”.
In a statement after the meeting, Mayawati said that when the V P Singh government accepted the Mandal Commission report and implemented 27% reservation for OBCs, “fulfilling a condition set by the BSP for giving it outside support”, the BJP had strongly opposed the government move.
She said that the BSP had always supported the OBC cause, and that of other communities, all through its four governments in UP.