Akhilesh Reacts To Mayawati's Reason For Ending BSP-SP Alliance: 'Sometimes Things Said To Hide...'

BSP chief Mayawati said that she had to end the alliance with Samajwadi Party after Akhilesh Yadav stopped taking calls from senior BSP leaders after 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati revealed the reason behind breaking the alliance with Samajwadi Party after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. She said that SP chief Akhilesh Yadav had started avoiding calls from BSP leaders, as a result of which she took the decision to end the alliance with SP for the party's honour. Reacting to this, Akhilesh Yadav remarked that "sometimes things are said to hide one's own intentions." 

Yadav stated that the day the alliance with BSP ended, the leaders of both the parties, including him, were present on a public platform in Azamgarh. He also said that none of the leaders knew that the alliance had been called off.  "I myself wanted to call and ask why it was done. Sometimes, certain things are said to hide one's own intentions," he said.

Ahead of the upcoming by-elections in Uttar Pradesh, the BSP has released a 59-page booklet, which aims at informing the party leaders about the decisions taken by their chief Mayawati in the last few years and the significance behind them. In this booklet, she has also revealed as to why BSP and SP alliance ended.

In 2019, the BSP and SP forged an alliance to contest the Lok Sabha elections, sharing 38 seats each, and keeping out Congress from the coalition. However, the BSP won 10 of the 38 seats it contested, while the SP won five of the 37 seats from where it fielded candidates. Rashtriya Lok Dal, which was also part of this alliance, did not win any seat out of the three seats it contested.

Following this, Mayawati in 2019, had announced that her party would contest all the polls "small or big" on it own. She had also said that she would only work with Yadav again if he "fulfills his political duties". "The SP’s behaviour after the Lok Sabha elections has forced the BSP to think whether it will be possible to defeat the BJP in the future. This is not possible. Therefore, in the interest of the party and the movement, the party will contest all small and big elections on its own strength," she had said in a series of tweets in 2019.

Now, Maywati has claimed that following the defeat in the Lok Sabha elections 2019, and BSP securing 10 seats compared to SP's five, Yadav had stopped maintaining relations with BSP and did not pick up calls from senior BSP leaders as well. Thus, to uphold the party's self respect, Maywati said she broke the alliance with the SP.

Prior to the 2019 alliance between BSP-SP, the parties had also joined hands in early 2018, for the Lok Sabha bypolls in Gorakhpur and Phulpur. They had defeated the BJP back then.