Has Mayawati resigned to play more active role in U P?

Lucknow: Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati may be planning to play a bigger role in the state politics and contest assembly election in Uttar Pradesh. The story doing the rounds here on Wednesday, a day after her resignation from the Rajya Sabha, is that she may contest against new chief minister yogi Adiyatyanath who is not a member of either Houses of state legislature.

He is likely to resign from the Lok Sabha soon and has already got assurance from some party members who have been elected to the state assembly to vacate the seat for him. He has not decided the constituency he will contest from but the chance is that he will prefer one form the eastern part, close to his Lok Sabha constituency of Gorakhpur.

Those who support the theory that Mayawati now wants to play a more active role here in months to come have also advanced some reasons. One of them is that it will help her regain some of the lost ground and bring back Dalits who have parted company and voted in favour of the rival BJP in recent assembly elections.

Dalits who constitute more than 21 per cent of the population had been her main support base. In last assembly polls a good many of them backed the rival because she had allotted higher number of seats to Muslims and shown sign of distancing herself from them .

This experiment tried for the first time this year was not successful as many Muslim candidates fielded by her did not win. She too had realised it and ,therefore, expelled the Muslim face of the party, Nasimuddin Siddiqui, after the election and offered a bigger role to her brother and other Dalits in the party.

She has made some more moves to return to her old constituency. The resignation on Dalit atrocity issue may be read in that light. Whether it has pleased all the Dalit or not but it was one of the reasons.

As such , it was a calculated move and not an overreaction. She had come to power fighting " Manuvadi forces" and by projecting herself as the messiah of the poor and Dalits. Last year she tried to change herself and extended her hand to upper castes and Muslims. This did not work to her advantage as she lost more than half of the seats she had won in 2012.

She was not a force to reckon with in Delhi. But here she can be more effective. She may be really thinking on these lines, as the political pundits believe.