By Sharat Pradhan, IANS,
Lucknow : Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) failed to win a single seat in the Karnataka assembly elections, but party bigwigs say the results are not at all disheartening.
“Whatever we have done is an achievement and will prove to be a source of encouragement for party workers to pump in greater efforts when it comes to the more crucial parliamentary election,” BSP’s national general secretary Satish Misra told IANS in an interview here.
Misra, who is credited with spearheading the BSP’s much hyped “social engineering” campaign that took the party to new heights in Uttar Pradesh, dismissed the notion that the party failed to repeat the formula in Karnataka.
“It was quite ridiculous to assume that our social engineering failed to work in Karnataka; as a matter of fact it worked very well to make a dent on quite a large number of the 224 seats in the state”, he asserted.
“For a party that stood at zero in that state, our performance just could not be under-rated. We did quite well in the blocks and rural areas”, Misra pointed out.
According to him, “in nine constituencies, BSP stood at the number two position and at the third spot in as many as 32 seats”.
Significantly, there were a few seats where the margin by which it lost was as low as 200-800.
“We have made the desired dent in the Congress bastion at several places. I can assure you that the Congress lost several seats in Karnataka essentially because of the BSP presence.”
Confident of repeating this in several other states where assembly elections are due this year, Mayawati’s Brahmin mascot predicted “major reverses” for the Congress in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir.
“Once we have made our presence felt in the assembly elections in these states, it will set the pace for our party’s stride in next year’s Lok Sabha poll, which is our ultimate goal.”
According to an Election Commission report, the BSP polled less than 5,000 votes in 187 of the state’s 224 constituencies. Of these, 150 were those where BSP candidates could not put up a tally of more than 2,500 votes.