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Mayawati celebrates birthday, to split UP into four states

	January 21, 2008

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati turned 52 on Jan. 15 and celebrated it with an announcement favouring the idea of carving out three more states out of Uttar Pradesh.



In another surprise, she said that her party was not in a hurry to withdraw support to the Congress led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre.



The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister announced a slew of development projects for her state and launched the ambitious Rs. 40,000 crore Ganga Expressway project. Mayawati said she was in favour of the creation of three new states - Bundelkhand, Poorvanchal, and Harit Pradesh.



On whether her party will continue to provide outside support to the UPA, considering her recent attacks on the Centre, Mayawati said the decision will be taken at the party’s national level convention. But she added that the dates for the party convention had not been finalised.



Like her birthdays in the past, celebrations this year too were thrown open to the public, first in Lucknow and later in the day in the national capital. Candles were blown, cakes were cut amidst rendition of the birthday song from her family members, party colleagues. bureaucrats and police officials, and pieces offered to her from all those gathered at the two functions - all in front of the multitudes of visual and print journos in a display of power and wealth.



While the Lucknow part of the celebration was held at her official residence in the capital, a conference room in a prominent five-star hotel had been converted into the venue for her press conference.











“I was put under house arrest” : Mulayam



The man who ruled Uttar Pradesh for nearly seven years in the course of three terms, accused Chief Minister Mayawati of putting him under house arrest - apparently to facilitate her 52nd birthday bash. “I do not know why I was placed under house arrest, except that it was on Mayawati’s orders. “Unka hukam hai” (Her word is law), Mulayam said.





Sonia Gandhi, PM greet Mayawati



One reason for Mayawati toning down her threat to withdraw support to the UPA government, observers say is that both Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called up Mayawati to greet her on her birthday. While cutting her birthday cake in Delhi, Mayawati thanked the Prime Minister who was then on a visit to China, for taking time out of his busy schedule to personally greet her. She also acknowledged the greetings from Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who called her up while she was in Lucknow. Mayawati revealed that in turn, she had enquired about the health of Sonia Gandhi, who was in hospital during the previous week.





Political alliances to checkmate rivals : Mayawati



In the third part of her autobiography, brought out on her birthday, Mayawati has let out a well known secret that each of her political alliances was a strategic move to checkmate rivals to further the BSP march.



She said that while the party had made enemies with SP and Congress at the same time, it had managed to vanquish them all.



Mayawati said while all parties were eager to join hands with BSP, arch-rival Mulayam Singh Yadav was the first to realise that capturing power without the dalit-led party was impossible. That BSP also agreed to this plan was only to “put BJP in its place” in the wake of the Ayodhya wave. Thus the SP-BSP alliance government was formed in 1993. “BSP’s first electoral objective was to keep BJP out of power and to take it off the Ayodhya chariot, in which we succeeded fully,” she says in the introduction to the book.



As the four-time Chief Minister says, the BJP employed every trick to “use” BSP’s strength. She said that BJP struck a tie-up to form the BSP regime for the third time in the hope to get a lion’s share in Lok Sabha polls in return.



She said the saffron party was forced to ally with her not out of any generosity as its leaders claimed but because it was completely shattered after the 2002 Assembly polls in which BJP was relegated to the third position with a mere 88 seats. Mayawati said, “BJP leadership must have regretted that despite its support, Mayawati never let it dictate its policy.”



“Congress was already angry with BSP for its complete decimation from its fort of UP while the second biggest party with the same mindset, BJP, also turned hostile to BSP because despite post-poll tie-ups with BSP, it was not able to succeed. As far as SP is concerned, its enmity with us had reached a murderous limit on June 2, 1995,” she said.





Congress is anti-dalit : Mayawati



Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh’s greetings may have led to Mayawati not announcing withdrawal of support to the UPA, but this has not resulted in stopping her attacks on the Congress. A day after Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi visited Bundelkhand for wooing dalits, Mayawati put the Congress among the anti-dalit forces.



The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister used an incident where a Congress MLA allegedly slapped a lower caste legislator to attack the Congress. Mayawati vowed to teach the Congress which nurtured an anti-dalit mind-set a lesson.



Mayawati said the ruling party at the Centre was exploiting the dalit community. “Instead of protecting the dalits, the Congress has been exploiting them for the past 60 years. I will change their mindset in Uttar Pradesh. I will not tolerate such behaviour if voted in power in other states”, she said.



Observers say Mayawati has been playing on the aspirational appeal of her projection as a prime-ministerial candidate in recent months. She can be expected to use the latest incident to claim that dalit interests are not safe under Congress dispensation. In any case recent state elections have shown a movement of dalits away from the Congress even in states which have no considerable BSP presence.



The Congress has been making desperate attempts to stall the erosion in dalit votes. The Bundelkhand visit of Rahul Gandhi was aimed at telling the dalits of the region that the BSP has not been sensitive enough to the concerns of the drought-hit region of Uttar Pradesh.





Bundelkhand neglected : Rahul Gandhi



Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi during his visit to the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh last week met families of 25 farmers who committed suicides because of indebtedness. Presenting a virtual chargesheet against the State government for the plight of the people of the backward region, Rahul Gandhi said in Jhansi that he would present his report card on Bundelkhand to the Prime Minister and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi.







He requested the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister to visit Bundelkhand for making an assessment of the situation on the ground. He claimed that in the past two years, over 2000 people have died of hunger in the region. He said even five paise of a rupee allocated by the Centre was not reaching the intended beneficiaries in Uttar Pradesh.





Tax shocker for Mayawati



The Income Tax Department is planning to challenge the Income Tax Act Appellate Tribunal’s clean chit to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati. In a recent order, the Tribunal had legitimised the cash and properties the Chief Minister had collected as donations from her supporters.



Mayawati’s political rivals have been charging the Government with an attempt to help the state Chief Minister as the tribunal order would provide her relief in the disproportionate assets case.



The Finance Ministry has said that it would move the Delhi High Court to challenge the order. “Action will be taken as per the law,” a Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) spokesperson said on the Centre’s plan of action after the ITAT order gave a clean chit to Mayawati in a disproportionate assets case.



Observers say the Finance Ministry’s move comes in the backdrop of strained ties between Mayawati’s BSP and the Congress in recent months. The department could file the appeal by April against the ITAT order which held that the BSP supporters had given gifts including cash and house properties out of love and affection.