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Stampede kills 2 at Mayawati rally as huge crowd gathers to hear BSP chief

Atul Chandra | Updated on: 10 February 2017, 1:47 IST

The huge rally addressed by Mayawati in Lucknow on Sunday ended in chaos in which two women were crushed to death and several injured.

An estimated crowd of over a lakh had turned up to hear the Bahujan Samaj Party chief on Kanshi Ram's tenth death anniversary.

The stampede occurred when some people tried to force their way in the Kanshi Ram Rally Sthal.

Sandeep Pal/Rajasthan Patrika

The strategy

"Stay away from the media," she cautioned her party leaders and workers. "I interact with the media only when necessary and read out a prepared text as they blow things out of proportion," Mayawati told her audience.

She emphasised that she did not have a speech writer and never had one. "I write my own speeches. When I was chief minister, people thought that some bureaucrat wrote my speeches, which was wrong." She said that after writing her speeches she had to go through them before reading from the text, whether at public meetings or press meets.

BSP president Mayawati used the tenth death anniversary of Kanshi Ram to show her strength and to set the agenda for the coming Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.

The massive crowd which gathered in the state capital on Sunday had travelled by 19 trains and over 200 buses, besides other means of transport. Maximum trains -- 15 -- were assigned to western Uttar Pradesh, considered to be a BSP stronghold.

The party's Rajya Sabha member Satish Mishra's estimated that the crowd to be around several lakhs.

Mayawati's thrust on western UP couldn't be missed as the BSP leader spoke of a separate bench of the Allahabad High Court for the region, besides a separate state. The demand for a high court bench in western UP is a thorny issue which has cropped up time and again crippling the court's work. It is another matter that even Mayawati could not resolve the issue when she was in power. By making a mention of it she has set the cat among the pigeons as it is an emotive issue for lawyers and litigants of western UP.

Attack on Modi

As the BSP chief took on her political opponents, her fiercest attack was directed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. In what should worry her opponents, Mayawati said that ever since the BJP came to power at the Centre the communal forces had become over active. "In the name of cow the Gau Rakshaks have turned tyrannical towards Dalits and Muslims," she said in what could be interpreted as her open effort to bring together Dalits and Muslims. The combination would give Mayawati an edge, especially in western UP where Muslims felt let down by the Samajwadi Party after the Muzaffarnagar riots.

To drive home her point she equated Akhlaq's killing in Bishada village with the Una incident, Rohith Vemula's suicide and BJP leader Daya Shankar Singh's derogatory remarks against her.

Her third carrot for voters of the region was to revive the demand for a separate state carved out of 26 western UP districts. When she was the chief minister, her government had twice passed a resolution for the creation of a separate Harit Pradesh. Mayawati blamed the Centre for not doing anything in that direction.

Mayawati said BJP is playing politics over surgical strike and that only army should get the credit

Her government's resolutions were, however, not for a separate western UP state alone as she also demanded statehood for eastern UP and Bundelkhand.

In 2014, the Rashtriya Lok Dal had also pitched for a separate state.

Mayawati took on the prime minister for failing to keep his promises on creating employment opportunities, removing poverty and bringing down prices of essential commodities like rice, atta and daal.

She criticised the prime minister for simply laying the foundation stone for the revival of fertiliser plant in Gorakhpur. Nothing more has been done to operationalise the plant for creating jobs.

She attacked the Samajwadi Party government for splurging hundreds of crores on publicity and taking credit for projects like Lucknow Metro which were mooted by her government. In her assessment, Akhilesh Yadav's government was a failure on all fronts---power, law and order and healthcare.

Significantly, she blamed the NDA government for poor the law and order situation in Delhi.

On surgical strike carried out across the LoC, Mayawati said that the ruling party at the Centre is taking political mileage. The credit should go to the army and not the political party, Mayawati said.

First published: 9 October 2016, 6:29 IST