Dalit leader Mayawati today lashed out at Congress's Rahul Gandhi over his comment that she had spurned the party's overtures for an alliance. Mr Gandhi, she said, "can't set its own house in order but is taking potshots at BSP".
Insisting what Mr Gandhi said is "absolutely false", Mayawati said the defeat in UP elections should be the focus now than "these petty things".
"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, Mr Gandhi had said that the Congress had offered alliance to Mayawati and evebn offered to make her the Chief Ministerial candidate, but "she did not even talk to us".
Lashing out at the BSP chief, 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 her Bahujan Samaj Party.
"Now even 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 added.
The Congress had gone it alone in the recently-concluded assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. 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 had hugely boosted the SP performance, even though the BJP won election, it had practically pushed the Congress out of the state.
The party had registered one of its worst performances, winning only two seats out of 403 and getting a vote share of less than 2.5 per cent. Ninety-seven per cent of the Congress candidates had lost their security deposit.
The BSP's performance had only been slightly better than that of the Congress.
The BSP won just one seat and a vote share of around 13 per cent. Nearly 72 per cent of its candidates also lost their deposit in the election, which turned out to be a bipolar contest between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party.
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