Even as BSP chief Mayawati has sought to make inroads into southern India by holding rallies in states like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, the Congress seems to be confident that her brand of politics would not succeed in the region unlike in northern India.
The view has emerged even as the Sonia Gandhi-led party has indicated its growing uneasiness over the slow growth of BSP at its cost, by attacking Ms Mayawati for losing her “focus” on the “pressing importance” of governing UP and instead getting “preoccupied” with building her party base across the country.
With Karnataka going to the polls in the next few months, the Congress leadership has analysed that the BSP would not be able to cause any significant damage to it, unlike in Gujarat and Himachal Assembly elections and the Delhi municipal elections during 2007. “On the ideological and social justice platforms, there is no political space for Mayawati and her brand of politics either in Karnataka or in any of the other southern states as social justice has been practised in all the four states for a long period now,” AICC media department chairman Veerappa Moily says.
The Congress, he says, has seen such threats to its base and successfully overcome these challenges earlier also. Whether it is land reforms or reservation, planks that could be used by BSP are already being practised in the southern states for several decades now, Moily points out.
“BSP might attract a microscopic segment of some opportunistic politicians at the most in the south, as the kind of political space Mayawati is looking for in the south is simply not available outside the Congress there,” he says, pointing out that from 1994 to 2004, the BSP vote share in Karnataka had increased from 0.94 per cent to only 1.05 per cent.
However, party sources make it clear the Congress was not taking the BSP threat in south lightly, as all these years neither the late Kanshi Ram nor Mayawati herself had concentrated much on the region like she is doing now.
“We will be closely monitoring her strategy for the region, particularly as she returned to power in UP only by practising the Congress brand of inclusive politics in the last Assembly elections, while the Congress itself failed to do so,” the sources say. The Congress attack on Mayawati following the New Year’s Day terrorist attack on a CRPF camp at Rampur and plans to hold anti-state government rallies throughout UP in February are being seen as attempts to keep her busy with Uttar Pradesh.