Taking up the gauntlet of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath offer to the Bahujan Samaj Party on going for Mayoral polls at Meerut and Aligarh using ballot papers, party chief Mayawati dared the CM to go for re-polls at all 16 Mayoral sets with ballot papers rather than seeking the same for two seats where BSP was the winner.
On Sunday, Yogi had commented that if the BSP had problem with the EVMs then the government was ready to hold re-elections in Aligarh and Meerut with ballot papers after BSP Mayors resigned from these seats.
Mayawati further said that the BSP won the two Mayoral posts only as the BJP failed to liveeup to peoples’ expectations. The BSP chief said that if the BJP did not misuse EVMs and official machinery, then why did it lose in Nagar Palika and Nagar Panchayat elections which were held using ballot papers.
Prrobably buoyed by her party’s performance in Urban Local Bodies polls in UP, Mayawati would be campaigning for Gujarat Assembly polls for a day on Tuesday. She will be addressing a public meeting at Ramesh Parekh Rangdarshan Maidan in Rajkot on Tuesday. The BSP is contesting in all 182 Assembly seats in Gujarat where polling is scheduled on December 9 and 14.
Earlier she had deicded against campaigning in the western state and in fact asked party workers to reach Jaipur for a rally on December 1. Eveb in Himachal Pradesh, the BSP gav campaigning a miss and sent close aide Satish Chandra Mishra insted.
In UP civic polls, Mayawati neither campaigned nor voted but still the BSP managed to get satisfactory results with support from Dalits and Muslims.
While addressing party workers in Lucknow last month, Mayatwai had said that talks for alliance with the Congress failed over seat sharing arrangement after which her party decided to contest all the seats in Gujarat.
The BSP chief had had said that she was not averse to electoral tie-ups with like-minded parties to stop the BJP juggernaut other communal forces, but the BSP will do so only if it was given a ‘respectable share’.
Referring to Himachal Pradesh, she had said that the Congress party was not ready to part with some seats it had traditionally been losing.
Mayawati told workers that that in the later satges o t he talks between Satish Chandra Mishra and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s political advisor Ahmad Patel, the Congress offered to give only 25 of its lost seats while in Himachal Pradesh, it had offered just 10 seats it had lost, which was inacceptable.