BSP supremo Mayawati’s demand for a “respectable” share of seats to contest in Uttar Pradesh in the next Lok Sabha polls appears unrealistic, and if she persists with such tactics, that seems almost delusional, the top dalit leader could be pricing herself out of the market.

Ms Mayawati led the BSP to electoral ignominy in 2017, having won zero seats in 2014, though she had close to a respectable 20 per cent voteshare. That stark reality should caution all parties that, in a multi-cornered contest, going alone can be extremely risky when a strong pole exists — in this case the BJP led by Narendra Modi. (UP CM Yogi Adityanath is likely to be a minor footnote.)

On the other hand, a combination of UP’s two strong regional parties, Mayawati’s BSP and Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, could prove invincible. This was shown in the UP byelections a few months ago, when they trounced the BJP.

This has led to the thinking, endorsed by surveys, that if the BSP and SP came together and joined forces with Ajit Singh, the BJP could be reduced to single-digit seats in the country’s largest state. If the Congress, a minor player in UP, was also part of this combine, the division of minority votes could be eliminated and an accretion of some upper caste votes to the Opposition coalition ensured. In such a scenario, even BJP stalwarts could be left high and dry in the UP Lok Sabha polls.

But Ms Mayawati seems to be ignoring this compelling logic in order to get what she deems a “respectable” number of seats as a part of an anti-BJP coalition. She declared in Lucknow on Sunday that she would fight alone if her share in the coalition was less than half the seats in UP.

It had been thought so far that the BSP-SP coalition in UP, where the BJP’s stakes are the highest in the country, was already in the bag, and that Ms Mayawati’s party was raising unreasonable demands of the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan as a negotiating stance. But after the BSP supremo’s Sunday remarks, analysts may think an anti-BJP coalition was not a concern for the BSP chief.

Interestingly, Ms Mayawti also led a no-holds-barred attack on dalit militant leader Chandrashekhar Azad, who was released from prison last week and announced rightaway that he would work for the BJP’s defeat in the next polls. This puts the former dalit CM and the current charismatic leader of young dalits on opposite sides of the fence.

Will this leave the BSP’s 18 per cent voteshare intact in UP at a time of widespread perception among dalits that they were unfairly treated by BJP governments? Ms Mayawati must reflect on this and make her agenda clear.