Lucknow, June 19: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Friday mobilised workers of her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to stage demonstrations in each of the state’s 70 districts as the Congress workers began statewide celebrations to mark the 39th birthday of their general secretary Rahul Gandhi.
Even as the demonstrations, also to be held at all state capitals across the country, were ostensibly termed a part of the BSP’s protests against the “anti-people’s policies” of the central government, Mayawati is understood to have clearly briefed party leaders down the line to raise slogans of “sharm karo (feel ashamed)”.
A pamphlet, prepared under the personal supervision of the chief minister, has already been distributed to BSP’s ministers, MPs, legislators and district coordinators in a special meeting she had convened here about 10 days back, informed sources said.
Bearing the pictures of the BSP’s ideologues as well her own, the pamphlet seeks to highlight that the entire opposition had got united ostensibly to prevent a Dalit’s daughter from becoming the country’s prime minister.
Though there is no mention of Rahul Gandhi’s name anywhere in the pamphlet, there is a clear insinuation on the Gandhi scion who has been condemned for his attempts to woo Dalits “by sharing a meal or sleeping in Dalit homes.”
The pamphlet also reflects Mayawati’s attempt to revert to her old “anti-Mahatma Gandhi” agenda. “Gandhiji continued to play fraud through such gimmicks and that was how he and the Congress party succeeded in depriving Dalits of certain special rights through the Poona Pact of December 24, 1932,” it says.
Through the pamphlet, the BSP supremo further seeks to highlight how Babasaheb Ambedkar repeatedly warned Dalits that Congress “would only always remain like a step-mother to them”, and stressed she was their only messiah and therefore they must not get carried away by Rahul Gandhi’s overtures.
Giving herself a clean chit in the Taj Corridor corruption scandal, she accused both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for “framing” her, impressing upon her followers that she was being targeted simply because the other political leaders “cannot accept the rise of a Dalit to the prime minister’s chair.”
The pamphlet also cites two specific occasions when she was “deprived” of the privilege of becoming the prime minister because of a “conspiracy of all her political rivals”.
–Agencies