After big defeats in Delhi and Bihar, the BJP and RSS were trying to flare up communal tension on a large scale in Uttar Pradesh by raking up the Ram Mandir issue ahead of next year’s Assembly elections, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati said on Friday.
Accusing the Narendra Modi government for giving a “free leash to communal elements,” Ms. Mayawati said the BJP and its affiliates were trying to incite religious feelings of Hindus for political gain as the party realized that people would no longer come under its influence or fall for its big-announcements and assurances.
The former UP Chief Minister predicted that as the polls near, following the Delhi and Bihar pattern, BJP Ministers and leaders would rush to UP and try to lure voters with inducements and big scheme promises but these would be put into cold storage once the elections passed.
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“Narendra Modi has started his ghisa-pita natak (hackneyed drama) in UP. For reasons of political greed, the Modi government now remembers the development of UP, one year before the polls. But barring his own constituency, Varanasi, he has neglected all other regions of the State,” Ms. Mayawati said on her 60th birthday.
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She accused the Modi-govenment of engaging in “cosmetic work” regarding Dalits to appropriate the legacy of B.R. Ambedkar, even as it plotted to finish out reservations, government jobs and other constitutional rights of these oppressed classes. Like previous years, Ms. Mayawati celebrated her birthday as a Jan Kalyankari Diwas Or People’s Welfare Day in the State capital. While she was in power, she used the day to announce major welfare schemes. Ms. Maywati instructed party functionaries to organize programmes at the district level and shower gifts upon the downtrodden as part of a “social responsibility.”
Targetting the Samajwadi Party government, Ms. Mayawati said the SP was working against the principles of Socialist Ram Manohar Lohia, whom the party calls an icon, and flayed it for wasting crores of rupees of public money on celebrating his birthday in a “royal” fashion.
The Socialism propagated by Mr. Lohia and the one practised by the Samajwadi Party are “heaven and earth” apart, she said. “Mulayam Singh says that if Ram Manohar Lohia were alive today he would have been pleased to see his birthday celebrated in a royal manner. But truth is that if Lohia was witness to the wasting of crores of rupees to celebrate Mulayam Singh's birthday in a royal manner, he would have immediately thrown him out from the list of Socialists,” Ms. Mayawati said.
Even as it wastes crores of rupees on Mulayam Singh’s birthday celebrations and on the annual Saifai Mahotsav, Ms. Mayawati said the Akhilesh Yadav government did not have the "money or time" to cater to the grave crisis faced by farmers in the State. Fifty districts in the State have been declared affected with drought. The BSP chief also alleged that the SP government was working with a mindset of “casteist and political hatred” towards Dalits and desecrating and neglecting the structures built in the honour of their icons, sants, gurus and mahapurush.
At the birthday function, Ms. Mayawati also released the 11th volume of her book, “A Travelogue of my struggle-ridden life and BSP movement,” along with the party calendar.