Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi today claimed that his party had approached Mayawati with the proposal to form an alliance in the recent UP assembly polls, with Bahujan Samaj Party supremo as the chief ministerial face, but she did not respond.
Rahul Gandhi also charged Mayawati with giving the Bharatiya Janata Party a walkover in UP, apparently acting under the fear of the central investigating agencies.
The Congress leader was speaking at the launch of the book, 'The Dalit Truth: The Battles for Realising Ambedkar's Vision', edited by his close aide K. Raju, in the national capital. “Mayawati ji did not fight the election (UP Assembly polls). We sent her a message saying that we could form an alliance and that she could be the chief minister. But she did not even talk to us. Kanshi Ram ji had strengthened the Dalit voice in Uttar Pradesh, though it did harm the Congress. But today, Mayawati ji says she will not fight for the Dalit voice. Why? It is because of the CBI, the ED, Pegasus. Now, it is up to the people to put up a fight,” he said.
Political observers have said that Mayawati was not as actively involved in the electioneering in the assembly polls in UP as she could have been. Other opposition parties charged her with having entered into a pact with the BJP. The BSP had a disastrous performance in the elections, winning just one seat, while its vote share dropped sharply to 12.88 per cent from 22 per cent in the 2017 polls.
Referring to the flogging of Dalit youths in Una a few years ago following which several persons belonging to the community had attempted suicide by consuming insecticide, Rahul Gandhi said that had he been in the place of those who had sought to kill themselves, he would have rather stabbed those who had beaten up his brethren.
“My father was killed, and I did not do that. In my heart, there is no hatred for his killers. But when I was in the hospital (meeting the youth who had consumed insecticide), I thought that had this happened to me, I would have rather killed the person who beat up my brother.”
Recalling a conversation he had with one of the persons admitted in hospital then, he said, “I told him that had I been in his place, and if I was ready to die, before committing suicide, I would have grabbed the knife from the kitchen, gone to the house of the person who had beaten up my brother and stabbed him.”
“But the man said, ‘Rahul ji, you do not understand’. He said had he killed that man, he would have born a Dalit again. I was taken aback. And then I understood that this person's shoulders bear the weight of a thousand, lakh lives,” he said.
Rahul further said that the Constitution has no meaning if the institutions are not free. “It is like you are in a vehicle where four travellers want to go to Agra and the driver says, I am driving to Jaipur. This is what is happening in this country now. How it is happening? By controlling the media, by controlling three or four industrialists, by controlling politicians through Pegasus. If I had taken even Re one, I would not have been able to make this speech. I would have just sat silent in a corner,” he said.
He said majority of the politicians are only interested in gaining power. “I was born in (a family that wielded) power. But it may be curious, I am not interested in power.”
Also, in an apparent reference to the Congress's continuous drubbing at the hustings, he said while the country has given him immense love, it has also hurled shoes at him. “I wanted to know why it happened. And the answer I got was that the country was trying to teach me some lessons,” he said.
