BSP turns to urban dalit, Muslim youth

Lucknow: With the BSP having two mayoral seats in the recent municipal elections in UP, the party has now decided to focus on urban constituencies for the 2019 LS elections. The BSP will now cultivate young Dalit voters in urban areas and make up for the depletion in its support base.

BSP president Mayawati has asked party leaders to identify issues that can relate to the urban Dalit youth and also how to address these issues.

The party leadership is aware that the young Dalit voters may not be as committed to the BSP ideology as the older generations were and need to be wooed with issues that affect them. “For the youth education and unemployment are the biggest issues while ideology comes later. We are preparing details of the number of Dalits who gained employment in BSP regimes and will compare and contrast them with other regimes”, said a party functionary on Tuesday.

The BSP believes that issues like employment, education-rather, lack of it, and discrimination affect the dalits as well as minorities and a focus on these issues will not only attract dalits but also Muslims to the BSP fold. It could lead to a new Dalit-Muslim combination in the next election.

“We have to underline the fact that people have seen SP and now BJP government and both have miserably failed to address all sections of society equally. It was the BSP government alone that followed the ‘Sarvjan Hitaye, Sarvan Sukhaye’ concept in the true sense of the term”, Ms Mayawati told party leaders at a meeting.

The BSP feels that the party should now position itself as the only alternative to the BJP for the Lok Sabha elections, at least in UP. “The SP has been on the downslide ever since Akhilesh Yadav took over and the Congress has touched its nadir. After the municipal polls where the BSP won two mayoral posts (Aligarh) and Meerut) and lost three (Saharanpur, Agra and Jhansi) by a margin of less than 2000 votes, people are turning towards the party. And this was the result when Behenji (Mayawati) did not campaign. If we plan our campaign well, we can turn things around in the 2019 and stop the BJP’s return to power”, the functionary explained.