Why Congress was left out of the SP-BSP alliance in UP

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Updated: Jan 12, 2019 17:25 IST

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati today firmly shut door on the Congress for any alliance in Uttar Pradesh saying there was not much difference between the grand old party and the BJP and both are corrupt.

“Whenever we ally with parties like Congress, they derive benefits, we don’t. Their vote was not transferred to us in earlier alliance. They gain from us. Our 1996 experiment shows that, even SP saw that in 2017,” she said at a joint press conference with Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Singh Yadav in Lucknow where she also announced the seat sharing agreement between the two parties.

She had been lukewarm to Congress overtures over the past year and had gone solo in the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan while in Chhattisgarh she tied up with Ajit Jogi’s Janata Congress Chhattisgarh late last year. The Congress went on to form the government in all the three states.

Mayawati was particularly scathing on the grand old party. “The Congress ruled in UP and at the Centre for several years after Independence. But the backward castes and economically weak suffered, corruption went up,” she said.

But she didn’t spare the BJP either. “BJP and Congress are the same. Their thinking are same, both are corrupt and involved in defence scams. Bofors brought down a Congress government, Rafale will bring down the current BJP,” the BSP chief said.

She also accused the BJP government at the Centre of ushering in an ‘undeclared emergency’.

“The present BJP is suppressing opposition like the Congress used to. It is undeclared emergency now. Both the BJP and Congress have misused government machinery, she said.