Former Chhattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi met Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati in Delhi on Wednesday, two leaders familiar with the development said, triggering speculation of a possible tie-up between the BSP and Jogi’s Janta Congress Chhattisgarh in assembly elections due later this year.
An alliance between the two in Chhattisgarh, which has been ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2003, would replicate the experiment in Karnataka, where Mayawati forged a pre-poll tie-up with the Janata Dal (Secular) of HD Deve Gowda ahead of the May 12 polls.
The Karnataka election produced a hung assembly, but the Congress supported the JD(S) after the election to stop the BJP from coming to power, propelling Deve Gowda’s son HD Kumaraswamy to the chief minister’s post.
Chhattisgarh is the arena for a bi-polar fight between the BJP and the Congress, and governments in the state are decided by wafer-thin margins. The difference between the votes polled by the BJP and the Congress in the last assembly elections was less than 98,000 votes.
“The two discussed possibilities of an alliance,” the first leader cited above said on condition of anonymity. If a pact is sealed, he said, Jogi may leave 20 seats to the BSP and field his candidates in the remaining 70 seats.
{{/usCountry}}“The two discussed possibilities of an alliance,” the first leader cited above said on condition of anonymity. If a pact is sealed, he said, Jogi may leave 20 seats to the BSP and field his candidates in the remaining 70 seats.
{{/usCountry}}“It was just a courtesy call,” Amit Jog, son of Ajit Jogi and a Chhattisgarh legislator, said. “A pre-poll alliance may not be feasible at this point of time. We have decided to contest all 90 seats.”
Amit Jogi said his father had known Mayawati for long and the two discussed for over an hour issues of national importance and those that were relevant to Chhattisgarh. “We discussed putting all our resources together to unseat communal forces in the state,” he said.
Ajit Jogi, a former Congress veteran, founded his party in 2016 along with his son, after being expelled from the Congress.
Jogi is trying to turn the Chhattisgarh polls into a triangular fight, but his party is an untested entity in the state.
The Bahujan Samaj Party fielded candidates in all 90 assembly segments in 2013, won 1 seat and polled 558,000 votes with a share of 4.4%. The Bahujan Samaj Party polled more than 27,000 votes (a share of more than 15%) in seven assembly segments.
The Bahujan Samaj Partyfielded candidates in all 11 parliamentary seats in Chhattisgarh in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and its vote tally plummeted to 294,000, with a share of 2.4%.