Why no one cares about Nasimuddin Siddiqui-Mayawati spat
When Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Nasimuddin Siddiqui openly accused his political mentor and party supremo Mayawati of demanding money, it did not cause any kind of outrage.
After all, those who were familiar with the ways of the BSP chief and her party, know how money has always played a key role in the functioning of the party.
Be it Mayawati or Siddiqui or for that matter any other prominent BSP leader, they have all amply demonstrated their obsession for wealth. This was the umpteenth time that the BSP president and her blue-eyed boys were charged with minting money, even as the party loves to blow its trumpet for championing the cause of the country’s downtrodden Dalits.
Interestingly, this was also not the first time that a BSP leader was making serious accusations against Mayawati after being expelled or suspended from the party. Ironically, not very long ago, Siddiqui had stood up to hold a brief for Mayawati when a belligerent Swami Prasad Maurya sought to blast her with the same charges being levelled by Siddiqui today.
Unlike Siddiqui, Maurya was smart to himself step out of the party before Behenji could show the door to him.
Siddiqui was also on the forefront of the attack on then lesser known BJP leader Swati Singh, in retaliation to certain sexist remarks against Mayawati by Swati’s husband Dayashankar Singh.
Even as the BJP took Dayashankar Singh to task by expelling him from the party, Siddiqui, in an obvious bid to prove that he was more loyal than the king, went to the extent of making worse sexist remarks against both Swati and her teenage daughter.
Even earlier, it was Babu Singh Kushwaha who made similar noise against Mayawati, after she dropped him like a hot potato following the expose of his involvement in the Rs 8,000-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam.
The list does not end with Kushwaha. And the common factor was that each of these stooge-turned-detractors chose to willingly toe the Mayawati line - which essentially boiled down to mustering up resources and filling the coffers of the party and its leadership. And it was common knowledge that many of these so-called “fundraisers”, in the bargain, found it convenient to fill their own coffers as well.
All said and done, Siddiqui could be best compared with Samajwadi Party’ s most controversial minister Gayatri Prasad Prajapati, who was not only notorious for his corrupt practices but was currently behind bars on account of his involvement in a rape case.
Siddiqui did the same kind of errands for Mayawati, as Prajapati was known to be carrying out for Mulayam and also subsequently for Akhilesh.
There is no reason to either suspect Siddiqui of making a false allegation, nor could there be any doubt in Mayawati’s counter-charge that her one-time confidante was pocketing away money collected in the name of the party.
Siddiqui’s claim that he had agreed to sell off all his property to muster up Rs 50 crore, allegedly demanded by Mayawati, was in itself a pointer to the kind of wealth he had acquired over the years.
Having begun his career as a sepoy, today Siddiqui is believed to be a man of billions. His visible assets in different parts of UP alone were estimated to be far beyond all his known sources of income. Besides, there are alleged huge "benami" investments in a leading construction company in the name of his son, who has also come under Mayawati’s axe.
On the other hand, why there is no reason to brush aside Siddiqui’s allegation against Behenji is also not far to seek. Who does not know that it was a done thing in BSP to “buy” party tickets in every election?
Evidently, there were no free tickets in the party and if insiders were to be believed, the average rate in the March 2017 state Assembly election was anything between Rs 50,000 and Rs 4 crore.
In fact, the story that did the rounds in the aftermath of demonetisation was about the BSP boss seeking replacement of demonetised notes shelled out as the “fee” by ticket aspirants for the 2017 election. And mind you, those who failed to do so on account of paucity of new currency, had to lose their tickets.
In a nutshell, nothing could describe the current spat between Mayawati and Siddiqui better than that the age old saying – "the pot calling the kettle black".