Election autopsy on Mayawati's table in Delhi

LUCKNOW: After drawing a blank in 2014 Lok Sabha polls, BSP resurrected itself by winning 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh, but party supremo Mayawati is not amused. Camping in Delhi, she sought ground reports from all constituencies, particularly where the party was confident of a win and where the defeat margin was thin.
Sources said, the post-mortem will hover around the extent to which the prospects of gathbandhan, especially BSP, were dented by Congress, seats in which seamless vote transfer didn’t happen and failure on part of local leaders and cadre.
“All winning candidates and senior party workers in charge of areas, have been summoned to Delhi for a meeting on Sunday. Mayawati ji is also looking at constituency-wise reports to analyse what went wrong. Winning 10 seats is not enough since we were expecting the alliance to perform much better. Also, ground reports showed we were performing well in constituencies where we lost. And in-depth analysis will take place,” said a senior party member.
Right after the results, Mayawati had alleged that BJP manipulated EVMs. “It left only 15 seats so that nobody would question them on what they were doing in other seats,” she said. In Machhlishahr, the party recorded its closest defeat. Its candidate T Ram lost to BJP by a paltry 181 votes in what was among the lowest margins in the country. Meerut is another constituency where BSP was confident of winning, but its candidate Haji Mohammed Yaqoob lost by 4,729 votes.
Among the other constituencies where the party will particularly be assessing its performance are Salempur, where state president RS Kushwaha lost by 1.12 lakh votes and Dhaurahra where Arshad Siddiqui lost by 1.60 lakh votes. Other constituencies where its margin of loss was low include Basti where the margin was 30,354, Sant Kabir Nagar where the margin was 35,749 votes and Sultanpur, where its candidate lost to BJP’s Maneka Gandhi by 14,526 votes. “Once all constituency reports are studied, Mayawati will address a meeting of all party workers in June,” said a party member.