The Bahujan Samaj Party, which lost power in Uttar Pradesh 11 years ago, will now organise camps in rural areas to strengthen the party base before the next Lok Sabha elections to be held next year.
This mission of the BSP will be based on the lines of its founder Kanshi Ram’s cadre camp through which the party had spread its base and formed the government four times under Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh.
According to reports, these cadre camps of the BSP will be mainly organised in the villages as the party wanted to re-establish the connection with rural masses which were earlier seen as the party’s core vote bank. Under this campaign, the party will set up camps in villages without making any propaganda or much funfare.
There will be neither a stage nor a chair in the camp and everyone will sit on the ground and give the message of respect to everyone in BSP. The party hopes that this will help them make a direct connection with the downtrodden section of the society.
The BSP, which has not formed the government in the state for the last 11 years, is gradually losing its base as it was not just out of power in the state but in the last assembly elections, the party could win just one seat. The BSP, which formed the government with an absolute majority (206 seats) in the 2007 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, was reduced to 80 seats in 2012.
The party suffered the most in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when it lost in all the 80 seats in the Modi wave and could not even open its account.
Thereafter, the BSP, which was hoping to return to power in the state in 2017, suffered a major setback when it could win only 19 out of 403 seats in the UP Assembly polls.
The party contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in alliance with arch-rival Samajwadi Party and had to face the BJP. It could win only 10 seats. The BSP broke its alliance with the SP and contested alone in all 403 seats in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2022 only to suffer the biggest defeat in its history. The BSP was able to win just a single seat.
Mayawati has now announced to go it alone in the 2024 general elections. Talking to mediapersons on her birthday (January 15) in Lucknow, Mayawati announced that the party would contest the upcoming elections on its own.
She said she would not forge an alliance with anyone in the state. The main reason for this is that after the alliance, the other party gets the votes of BSP but it does not get the votes of the other party. Along with this, former CM Mayawati asked her party leaders and workers to start preparing for the upcoming elections from now.
