The turnout was impressive considering the rain didn’t relent. Drenched in the season’s first showers, Sundernagar looked decidedly off colour. But the venue for BSP supremo Mayawati’s rally was full. Elsewhere at Mandi, 23 km away, the Congress had pulled out all stops to welcome Sonia Gandhi — the 36 empty buses near the rally venue pointed to the crowd of supporters — but she failed to make it due to the weather, a feat Mayawati managed to accomplish earlier in the day.

The rain and the rallies were the twin talking points in the Mandi district today. The grand turnout for Gandhi’s address was on expected lines but what took Sundernagar by surprise was the presence of 8,000-odd people at Mayawati’s ‘satta parivartan’ rally. There weren’t any loud cheers or a thunderous ovation for the lady who was introduced as the “bhaavi pradhan mantri” and “one of the eight most powerful women of the world” by the state coordinator for BSP Man Singh Mandhera, but the crowd paid their respect by listening to her in silence.

But before her, it was Satish Chander Mishra, the party general secretary and the man behind Mayawati’s social engineering model, who mesmerised the crowd with his commanding baritone and crisp speech that hammered home the fact that he was an upper-caste Brahmin from a powerful family who had now found deliverance in the BSP, “an egalitarian party”.

Mindful of the drizzle, Mayawati began by thanking people for braving the cold to lend her an ear before beginning her spiel on the progress made by Uttar Pradesh in her regime besides reiterating that she was not working for Dalits alone. “My party is toiling hard for farmers, employees and businessmen. It is financed by its workers and safeguards their interest unlike other parties that dance to the tunes of their fundraisers, the corporates,” she declared. The speech was long and laboured but the core crowd hung on. Later, they were all praise for a party they called the Third Force. “For far too long we have had no choice but for the Congress and BJP, the BSP’s entry is a healthy development,” said P K Aggarwal, an SDO. Others like Moti Ram Sharma, a retired superintendent who confessed to being a close friend of BJP candidate from Sundernagar Thakur Roop Singh, admitted that the party had managed to create a flutter with the choice of its candidates.

... contd.