The 'elephant' has stumbled in Gujarat. The Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party has failed to win a single seat in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly, where it strove hard to emerge as the third alternative.
It was a case of fifth-time unlucky for the BSP which has been contesting some seats in Gujarat since 1990.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati campaigned in the state in both the first and the second phase as her party put up candidates for all the seats, encouraged by its success in Uttar Pradesh.
Mayawati had deputed senior BSP leader Gandhi Azad to Gujarat to personally supervise the campaign, but found that the climate in the western state, where the polity is bipolar between the BJP and the Congress, was far different from the Hindi heartland.
Gujarat was Mayawati's first experiment at such a major scale outside Uttar Pradesh and her party has already announced that it would go it alone in all the state assembly polls and the next Lok Sabha elections.
Gandhi Azad, however, sought to downplay the rout of the party saying it was just a first move by the BSP in the state and his party never gets dejected by electoral reverses and continues to fight.
The debacle has come at a time when the Mayawati-led party, whose election symbol is the elephant, was seeking to make inroads into a number of states.
Incidentally, the BSP's catch line in Gujarat was "Hathi kahin Gajraj Hai, Modi ja Yamraj hai" (It is not just any elephant, but the king of elephants and Modi's nemesis).
