A day after her party's dismal show in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) chief Mayawati on Friday, 11 March, said that the "results were opposed to BSP's expectations".
The BSP could only win one seat out of the total 403 seats that went to polls.
"We should not be discouraged by it. Instead, we should learn from it, introspect and carry forward our party movement, and come back to power," she said.
"Before 2017, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) did not have a good stake in Uttar Pradesh. Likewise, today, the Congress is also undergoing the same phase as BJP. UP election result is a lesson for us to continue putting in efforts," she added.
Mayawati also said that the BJP has been successful in misleading.
"Negative campaigns succeeded in misleading, that BSP is BJP's B-team, while the truth is opposite. BJP vs BSP war was not only political but principled and electoral as well," she said.
The BSP chief also said that one of the primary reasons the BJP won the election was because people were afraid that the SP's "jungle raj" would return if the latter came to power.
“BSP supporters, who are primarily upper caste Hindus and from several OBC communities, had a fear in them that if the SP came back to power, the state would be thrown back to the jungle raj and goonda raj of the past. Hence, they voted for the BJP,” she said.
Claiming that Muslims voters had also caused her party's downfall, Mayawati said that in order to defeat the BJP, the Muslims trusted the SP. "We have learnt a harsh lesson from trusting Muslims," she added.
"If the votes of the Muslims and Dalits had combined, we could have repeated what the TMC did in West Bengal," Mayawati said, adding that it there was a three-way fight in the state, the BSP would have performed much better.
In 2017, the BSP had a vote share of more than 22 percent. In 2016-17, Mayawati lost several OBC leaders to the BJP, and recently, the party was emptied out further as many flocked to the SP.
In the Assembly election results declared on Thursday, 10 March, UP saw another saffron wave as the BJP and its allies won 273 seats in the 403-member Assembly, winning 41.29 percent of the total votes polled in the 2022 Assembly polls.
The Samajwadi Party-led alliance, the BJP's main rival in the state, won 125 seats, while the Congress won two seats. Jansatta Dal (Loktantrik), the party founded and led by mafia-turned-politician Raghuraj Pratap Singh 'Raja Bhaiya', also won two seats.
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