Mayawati’s tie-up with Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh is a message for Congress
Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has formed an alliance with former chief minister Ajit Jogi’s party for the Chhattisgarh assembly elections later this year, forcing a triangular contest for the first time in the history of the tribal state.
Mayawati’s decision is seen as a message to the Congress, which has been in talks with the BSP for a tie-up in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, that it had options other than the Congress if it was not given a respectable number of seats to contest.
It is a point that Mayawati underlined on Thursday as well when she counted the respectable number of seats for the BSP as one of the reasons why she had teamed up with Ajit Jogi’s Janta Congress Chhattisgarh.
According to the seat sharing formula agreed by the two leaders, the BSP will field 35 candidates and Ajit Jogi’s party, the remaining 55 seats.
The BSP’s talks with the Congress had fallen through in Chhattisgarh reportedly because the Congress was unwilling to concede more than seven to nine seats. Chhattisgarh assembly has 90 seats.
At a briefing to announce her brand-new alliance, Mayawati named Ajit Jogi as the coalition’s presumptive chief minister.
For Chhattisgarh that has seen a bi-polar fight between the BJP and the Congress and governments are decided by wafer-thin margins, Mayawati’s decision to force a triangular contest is seen as a setback for the Congress.
In the last assembly election, the difference between the votes polled by the BJP and the Congress was less than 98,000 votes.
The BSP fielded candidates in all 90 assembly segments in 2013, won 1 seat and polled 558,000 votes with a share of 4.4%.
But there were 12 seats where its candidates polled more than 10 per cent vote share. In five of these, they had polled over 20 per cent.
Jogi has been trying to turn the Chhattisgarh polls into a triangular fight, but his party is an untested entity in the state. The former Congress veteran founded his party in 2016 along with his son after being expelled from the Congress.
The new alliance is also seen as part of Mayawati’s 2019 plan where she wants to expand her party’s reach beyond Uttar Pradesh. She already has an alliance with Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka and Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana.
Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com
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Stalin accuses Centre of trying to use women's quota as 'weapon,' slams EPS over delimitation
Chennai (PTI): Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has strongly criticised the Centre over the women's reservation and accused it of trying to use it as a "weapon" to tackle the opposition before taking up the delimitation exercise based on population.
"The Union government is not concerned about implementing reservations for women. If their concerns were genuine, they could have done it right away. Rather than doing that, the BJP-led Centre is thinking of using it as a weapon to tackle opposition and take up the delimitation exercise based on population," he told PTI in an interview.
"Hence, the women's reservation must be implemented immediately without showing delimitation as a reason," the DMK president added.
Expressing apprehensions on the proposed delimitation exercise, the CM said it was the DMK that raised the first voice asserting the rights of the state after realising that Tamil Nadu would be affected by the proposed exercise. He also attacked his rival and AIADMK chief Edappadi K Palaniswami over the delimitation issue.
Recalling efforts made by the DMK to raise the issue of population-based delimitation, he said an all-party meeting and a meeting of CMs under the auspices of the Joint Action Committee seeking fair delimitation were convened. It sought to freeze delimitation for 25 years and stick to it based on the 1971 Census population.
"We urged the union government that states which successfully implemented population control programmes must not be punished," he added.
The party came up with "Tamil Nadu poradum, Tamil Nadu vellum" (Tamil Nadu will struggle, Tamil Nadu will win) and this is DMK's stand, he said.
"However, Palaniswami, who is seeking votes for the entry of the BJP through the backdoor, has till date been mute over delimitation, and this is a betrayal of the people of Tamil Nadu."
