Lucknow, June 13 (IANS) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Saturday asked workers of her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to stage demonstrations across the country on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s birthday June 19 against his party’s “anti-Dalit policies”.
She made the announcement at a specially convened day-long meeting of her ministers, party MPs, legislators, district coordinators and other senior leaders here.

A party source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mayawati told her audience to remain wary of Rahul and his Congress clan, whom she accused of staging a “drama” to decieve Dalits.

She termed Gandhi’s attempts to reach out to the Dalits by spending a night in their homes and sharing meals as a “drama”.

“Such gimmickry was played by all Congressmen including (Mahatma) Gandhi, who staged more melodrama than anybody else to project himself as some kind of messiah of the Dalit community, when fact remains that he was responsible for depriving the comunity of certain special rights and privileges by getting the Poona Pact passed Sep 24, 1932,” Mayawati told her audience.

Urging her partymen to stage street demonstrations and rallies at all district headquarters in Uttar Pradesh, she called for similar demonstrations in the capital town of all states June 19.

“Be wary of rival political parties, who are out to only misguide you. Remember their only objective is to weaken the BSP, that is why they were cooking up all kinds of stories to mislead you,” she told her partymen.

She impressed upon her partymen to remember that Babasaheb Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram alone were the true messiah of Dalits and that it was her successful experiment with “social engineering” that propelled her party to power entirely on it own in Uttar Pradesh, the source said.

She dispelled rumours about her disillussionment with Brahmins, who were alleged to have ditched her party at the Lok Sabha polls, and said, “We will continue to work on our mission of ’sarvajan hitaye’ (good of all) and our ‘bhai-chara’ (brotherhood) meetings will also continue with the same spirit as before.”