LUCKNOW: Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati yesterday declared herself India’s future prime minister.
“If I can become the chief minister of India’s most populous state four times — and this time entirely on my own without anyone else’s support, then why can’t I become the country’s prime minister,” she told a massive gathering of her party workers from different states during a one-day BSP national convention here.
Even as the audience applauded, Mayawati was quick to add: “If you pose this question to my casteist political adversaries, they will have no answer to this because they cannot see a Dalit’s daughter rising to such heights.”
Labeling the Congress party and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rank casteists, she said: “These parties felt most threatened when my name was proposed for prime ministership during the course of the UPA government’s trust vote in Parliament, so both the NDA and UPA decided to gang up and save the central government.”
Yet she was thankful to these very parties for bringing the BSP to the center stage of national politics. “Well, I should express my gratitude to these very parties as the profile enhancement that the BSP witnessed over a span of just six or seven days was something we would have otherwise taken six or seven years to achieve,” she said.
