Thaindian News

Lucknow, March 2 (IANS) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati Monday took her her own party men to task for the humiliating defeat suffered in the Bhadohi state assembly by-election Sunday.
Addressing a closed-door meeting of her party legislators at BSP state headquarters here in the afternoon, Mayawati not only named the “black sheep” in the party but also warned them of “consequences over the next three days”.

Significantly, among those on her target were her three cabinet colleagues - Naseemuddin Siddiqui, Rang Nath Misra and Indrajeet Saroj - who were entrusted with the entire poll management. Her Brahmin mascot Satish Misra was however spared of the onslaughts as he succeeded in passing the buck conveniently to Misra.

The emphasis at the meet was clearly on impressing upon the party men that BSP nominee Amar Singh Saroj had lost because of laxity on the part of some of her own leaders. “The three ministers deputed by me to look after the entire campaign will be made answerable. I am going to take their class after three days,” she was stated to have told the gathering.

She did not hesitate to put the blame also on her party candidate Amar Singh Saroj, whose elder brother’s wife Archana Saroj had been the sitting legislator from there. The by-election was necessitated on account of Archana’s demise.

Mayawati claimed, “Archana’s father Ram Nihor was keen to get his son fielded in her place. However, I refused to oblige him and gave the ticket to the brother of Archana’s husband, following which Ram Nihor, who has strong Congress leanings, sabotaged the poll all along.”

While the Bhadohi defeat hogged much of the three-hour long show, which was officially described as “launching of BSP’s national campaign for the Lok Sabha poll”, Mayawati did make it a point to spell out her key issues for the campaign.

These were: “scrapping of the bill that seeks to ban reservations on higher faculty positions in institutions like IIT and IIMs, job reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the private sector and reservation for poor among the upper castes too.”

And clearly with an eye on the Muslim vote, she added, “We are also strongly opposed to harassment of Muslim youth in the name of anti-terrorist operations.”