‘Can’t set own house in order’: Mayawati on Rahul Gandhi

BSP leader Mayawati on Sunday criticised Congress’s Rahul Gandhi for saying that she had spurned the party’s overtures for a pre-poll alliance. 

The Congress leader “can’t set its own house in order but is taking potshots at BSP”, she said.

Mayawati said Gandhi’s statement was “absolutely false”, adding the focus should now be on defeat in UP elections.

“The Congress must think 100 times before making such comments. They have been unable to win from the BJP but just keep taking these potshots. Congress has done nothing even in power and even out of power,” she added.

On Saturday, Gandhi had said that the Congress had offered alliance to Mayawati and even offered to make her the chief ministerial candidate, but “she did not even talk to us”.

The former Congress president alleged that Mayawati gave a clear passage to the ruling BJP in the state because of “the CBI, the ED and Pegasus”.

Mayawati said even Rajiv Gandhi, former prime minister and the late father of Rahul Gandhi, tried to defame the Bahujan Samaj Party.

“Now Priyanka Gandhi is doing the same by saying that I am afraid of ED and other probe agencies. All of this is not true. They should know that we have fought and won all these issues in the Supreme Court,” she said.

The Congress had gone it alone in the UP assembly election. After the disastrous performance of the alliance with the Congress in the 2017 polls, Samajwadi chief Akhilesh Yadav had not invited the party for a repeat performance, forging instead a rainbow coalition with smaller parties. While this hugely boosted the SP performance, it practically pushed the Congress out of the state.