Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati has predictably shot down chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s trial balloon of a mahagathbandhan to take on the BJP in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
Though politics is known as the art of impossible, to expect Mayawati and Mulayam Singh to contest the election together would have been equivalent to the naiveté of imagining a snake and mongoose playing together. Mayawati is known for her ego and ambition, Mulayam Singh is infamous for his betrayals, backstabbing and even bigger ego and ambition; both of them depend largely on the same vote bank and fancy their chances of winning the next election on their own. No, Mayawati is the west of Lucknow politics, Mulayam its east and the twain would have never come together.
So, does their refusal to jump into the electoral bed guarantee BJP electoral bliss in the 2017 elections? Though it would be too early to predict the outcome of the assembly polls, three trends can be forecast with reasonable amount of confidence. One, the Congress is likely to be wiped out and reduced to a non-entity; two, the Samajwadi Party will lose a huge chunk of votes; and, three, the real fight would be between the BJP and the BSP.
On its own, the Congress is a marginal player in the state. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress vote share plummeted by almost 11 percent, falling to all-time low of a paltry 7.5 percent. Its performance wasn’t different from the trends since the 2007 and 2012 assembly elections, when it had secured around eight and 11 percent votes respectively, winning just around 20 seats in the state assembly.
Since 2014, the Congress has slipped further. Though there was limited scope for it, the party’s meagre electoral prospects have diminished exponentially. Its leadership is in disarray, cadres have disintegrated and vote bank has shrunk to the point of oblivion.