Mayawati shatters 'saffron' dreams

Bharatiya Janata Party president Lal Kishinchand Advani felt let down as his Swarna Jayanthi Rath Yatra zipped through Uttar Pradesh.

Why? The BJP's ruling partner in the state -- the Bahujan Samaj Party -- had not kept its promise. Promise of sharing political platform with the BJP, which would have sent out the message that the combine is ready for a larger association at the Centre.

Adept at the art of one-upmanship, BSP strongman Kanshi Ram saw to it that Chief Minister Mayawati steered clear of Advani's meetings by throwing up one excuse after another. Thus, Advani was first told that the chief minister would receive him in Basti in eastern UP as his yatra arrived in the state. Later, it was to be the threshold of Lucknow. However, Mayawati ''fell ill'' at the eleventh hour.

The chief minister's office took care to issue a press release about her ''illness''. It said, ''The chief minister has suddenly taken ill and would therefore neither attend the scheduled Cabinet meeting nor meet legislators and other public representatives today.''

Despite Mayawati's absence, the BJP president evoked a fairly good response from the Lucknow crowds. And, by the evening, when Advani reached the local VVIP guest house for his night halt, the chief minister decided to call on him. Mayawati ensured that the information was ''leaked'' to the local newspapers to ensure good coverage.

Explaining the volte face, highly placed BSP sources said Mayawati wanted to welcome Advani at Basti. However, Kanshi Ram shot down the proposal. Eventually, the chief minister managed to prevail upon her mentor that the BSP could not afford to ruffle its coalition partner.

This realisation did not stop the chief minister from hurting the BJP on another occasion. On July 6, the BJP was shocked when Mayawati organised an impressive rally in Pauri Garhwal, a saffron bastion. Far from taking its alliance partner's help in putting up the show, Mayawati roped in Harak Singh Rawat who joined the BSP after rebelling against the BJP.

Much to the BJP's chagrin, Mayawati drew impressive crowds in Pauri Garhwal and started wooing upper caste leaders. Surely, Mayawati's first expedition to the hill region, where the BJP had bagged 17 of the 19 Assembly seats, had paid rich dividends. Besides Rawat, the BSP could enlist the support of a few other disgruntled BJP and Congress leaders.

Mayawati also impressed upon her audience that then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav was solely responsible for the Muzaffarnagar firing in which several Uttarakhand activists were gunned down and raped.

Within a week of this public meeting, a cabinet decision was taken to set up a subordinate services commission exclusively for the hill region. Lucknow-based journalist Govind Ballabh Pant, who halls from Nainital, said, ''If this ensures that all jobs in the hill area would go to the sons of the soil, then Mayawati is bound to make a deep dent in the BJP citadel.''

Some headway was made in winning over the hill areas when the state was under the governor's rule. Motilal Vora had created mini secretariats both in Nainital and Dehradun with a view to saving people the ordeal of coming all the way to Lucknow. But a dormant Congress failed to advantage of the decision and eventually the whole set up was abandoned.

As Mayawati is the first elected representative to take such a decision, her initiative may fetch her rich dividends in the hill area.

But what is surprising is that the BJP has chosen to ignore the BSP's designs. ''What if she is drawing good crowds in Pauri? Why should it bother us? After all, she has no evil designs,'' argue senior BJP leaders.

Thus, while the BSP is leaving no stone unturned in exploiting its connections with the BJP, the latter is left far behind in extracting some sort of reciprocation.

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