Remember Kanwar Singh Tanwar, the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) poster boy in Delhi? Tanwar declared assets of Rs150 crore during last November’s assembly polls and instantly became the richest candidate in the fray.
He was defeated but that didn’t deter him. Five months later, he again stood for the BSP from South Delhi during the Lok Sabha polls and grabbed the headlines again for a Rs5.27 crore increase in net worth, despite the economic downturn!
Having failed the ballot battle again, Tanwar went undergound for a few months. The stream of posters and hoardings featuring BSP supremo Mayawati with samajsevi Tanwar, which his supporters had splashed across South Delhi’s Mehrauli-Chhatarpur area, also went missing.
Now, Tanwar has resigned from the BSP saying “there’s corruption at every level in the party”. After spending almost two years in BSP and contesting two elections, Tanwar also “realised that the party does nothing for the poor and Dalits.”
“I felt suffocated in the BSP. I own and work for the Narayani Devi charitable trust, which helps the poor. But when I asked people in behen Mayawati’s government to help those who had been coming to me, I realised that the BSP wasn’t willing to do anything without huge bribes,” Tanwar said.
A few months back, Tanwar had expressed his wish to join the Congress. However, Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit and state Congress chief OP Agarwal shot down the proposal because giving him a place would make it seem that the Congress was running after the rich.
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