BHOPAL: Now that Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav have jointly managed to dislodge the BJP from Gorakhpur and Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh the question floating in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh is: will the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party once again come together and join hands with the Congress to end 14 years of saffron rule in Bhopal?
Sources said a major section of the Congress wanted the central leadership to quickly decide on a pre-poll alliance with not only the BSP and SP but also the smaller Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP) to prevent fragmentation of the Opposition votes in the year-end state polls.
Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia had advocated alliance with like-minded parties, including the BSP, but made it clear that the final decision lay with the high command.
According to Congress sources in Bhopal, a tie-up between the BSP and the Congress would boost the Opposition’s prospects in Vindhya, Gwalior-Chambal and Bundelkhand.
“While the BSP has a strong presence in the Vindhya region (including Rewa, Satna, Sidhi and Singrauli districts), Gwalior-Chambal and Bundelkhand, the SP too has sizeable votes in pockets of Bundelkhand, particularly Tikamgarh, Chhattarpur and Sagar districts,” a Congress MLA from Bundelkhand said.
Even the sitting BJP MP from Sagar, Laxminarayan Yadav, hails from the Yadav caste, he said, suggesting that there is space for the SP in this district in Bundelkhand region.
In the 230-member MP Assembly, the BJP has 166 MLAs, Congress 57 and the BSP four. There are three Independent MLAs. All four BSP MLAs — Sheela Tyagi (Mangawan), Usha Chowdhary (Raigaon), Balveer Singh Dandotiya (Dimani) and Satyaprakash (Ambah) — come from areas neighbouring UP. While Raigaon and Mangawan are located in Satna and Rewa districts in the Vindhya region, the other two seats are located in Morena district of the Gwalior-Chambal region.
The BSP’s strength in the Rewa-Satna region can be gauged from its victories in the Rewa Lok Sabha seat in the 1991 and 1996 polls. It finished second and third in Satna in the 2009 and 2013 polls, respectively.
A Congress official said the prospects of a tie-up with the BSP appeared bright since the two parties had shared a tacit understanding in MP in the last few years.
In 2016, the four sitting BSP MLAs played a key role in the Rajya Sabha poll triumph of Congress candidate Vivek Tankha. Further, the BSP’s decision not to field bypoll candidates indirectly helped the Congress win the last four assembly bypolls in the state, including Ater and Chitrakoot (2017) and Mungaoli and Kolaras recently.
Also, recently BSP chief Mayawati had publicly stated that if Congress MLAs in UP voted for her party candidate in the Rajya Sabha polls, her MLAs would support the Congress nominee from MP.
Kunwar Vikram Singh Natiraja, a three-time Congress legislator, said, “The party needs to decide early on an alliance with BSP, SP and GGP for the Assembly polls, as a formal alliance will disturb BJP’s calculations in 40-50 seats.”