Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati exited from her office on a bitter note, alleging that the new Samajwadi Party will put her welfare programmes in cold storage and take Uttar Pradesh backwards.
?When I took over the state it was in a very bad shape and I have single-handedly developed UP on my own. But I fear that the SP, which did no development work during its previous regime, will put halt all the development work that I have done and put the state back by many years,? she said whikle addressing mediapersons soon after tendering her resignation to Governor B L Joshi after facing a rout in the assembly elections.
Holding the opposition parties as well as the media responsible for her rout, Mayawati said the media built wrong perceptions about her government and very soon, the people of the state will get fed up with the functioning of the ‘goonda’ SP government and remember the good governance during the BSP rule.”
Trying to put the blame of the rout on a number of factors, Mayawati accusing the Congress and the BJP of raising the minority sub-quota bogey mid-way during the UP polls for their political gains, which eventually helped in transferring the Muslim votes to Samajwadi Party on a large scale.
Mayawati said 70 per cent of the Muslim votes had gone to the SP due to the minority reservation issue and alleged that the BJP also tried to attract the upper castes and the OBCs towards them for electoral benefits.
“Due to this, there was a fear in the Muslim community that the BJP may come to power. Finding the Congress weak and thinking that the OBCs and upper castes would vote for the
BJP, Muslims voted not for the Congress but the SP,” she claimed.
Mayawati claimed that her core votebank, the dalits, did not get divided and had remained with the BSP.
“All across the state, the Dalits have voted for the BSP. This is the reason the BSP is number two. Otherwise, it would have been left far behind…. My position would have been like that of Lalu Prasad in Bihar,” she said.
She also held the Centre responsible for working against the development of the state.
