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Lok Sabha elections 2019: Mayawati criticises own party over selection of candidates
“For some reasons, two candidates fielded by us were not sincere enough and failed the nomination scrutiny. Now, we have to contest in Delhi with five candidates. This was a fault of our selection committee,” Mayawati said.
In her first and only rally in Delhi this elections, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati Friday sought the support of Purvanchali voters in the national capital and criticised her own party’s Delhi unit for “not being careful enough” in fielding candidates in the city.
“For some reasons, two candidates fielded by us were not sincere enough and failed the nomination scrutiny. Now, we have to contest in Delhi with five candidates. This was a fault of our selection committee,” Mayawati told a crowd of over thousand at the open ground in North East Delhi’s Dilshad Garden.
The BSP had fielded candidates on all seven Lok Sabha seats with a strategy – four candidates from the scheduled caste (two Jatavs and one Valmiki), a Muslim candidate, an upper caste candidate and one from the other backward caste. Later, two candidates failed to pass the scrutiny for problems in the asset declaration form.
With this, the BSP is no longer contesting from the New Delhi segment and North West Delhi, which is a reserved seat for a Dalit candidate and considered crucial for the party, said Rajveer Singh, one of the BSP candidates.
In a separate interview to HT, Singh and the party’s Delhi unit president Surendra Kumar Chaudhary said the BSP will try “reclaiming” its Jatav and Valmiki vote bases in Delhi. The two castes, according to the BSP, have over 20 lakh voters.
The crowd that came to hear Mayawati had Samajwadi Party supporters, too. The two parties have an alliance the in Uttar Pradesh. In her 15-minute speech, Mayawati criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress for “ignoring the Dalits, Adivasis and people from other backward castes” for decades.
She said, “I want to appeal to the people from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to consider that most of you are here for your daily bread and butter. If you want to prosper in this city, vote for the BSP.”
