UP chief minister and BSP supremo Mayawati, while sensing a larger political fallout due to the likely coming together of the Congress and RLD for the 2012 UP Assembly polls, is leaning back on the strategy to make inroads into the Jat vote base to blunt the move of the rival parties.
She is learnt to be closely watching the ongoing Congress-RLD talks. Taking note of the fact that the coming together of the Congress and RLD could have serious political consequences for the ruling party in UP, Ms Mayawati is gearing up to make inroads into the Jat vote base by promoting two UP ministers from the community, apart from aggressively espousing the demands of the Jats.
The BSP is banking on the premise that the party can take the wind out of the Congress-RLD combine by consolidating the dalit, Muslim and part of Jat vote base in the western UP region, which has 98 Assembly seats in UP out of the total 404 seats.
Sources said she is promoting two of her ministerial colleagues hailing from the Jat community to cut into the vote base of the RLD in western UP. “Two UP ministers, namely Luxmi Narayan and Yograj Singh representing Mathura and Khatouli (Muzaffarnagar) Assembly constituencies, are being projected as the Jat answers to the Ajit Singh-led RLD. The party has about five Jat MLAs from western UP, who have been asked to prop up community leaders at the local level to widen the support for the party in the Jat land,” said a BSP functionary.
Ms Mayawati’s close watch on the Congress and RLD talks is being attributed to the party having won the 2007 Assembly polls handsomely in western UP by bagging about 40 out of the total 98 seats. The BSP had succeeded in bringing together dalit and Muslim voters in the last elections but the Congress and RLD leaders are hoping that their combine would be able to wean away the minority community voters from the camp of Ms Mayawati. She has been making attempts to make inroads into the Jat vote base by proactively espousing the demands of Jat leaders for reservation in the central services apart from taking firm stand on the issue of the sugarcane price by banning the import of raw sugar in the state.