By IANS
Lucknow : The Uttar Pradesh government appeared to be in a damage control mode Thursday, two days after a special Allahabad High Court bench restrained Chief Minister Mayawati from pulling down a 50-acre sports complex here.
At her cabinet meeting Thursday, she made it a point to issue a detailed clarification on the whole issue that had clearly brought her government into nationwide disrepute.
State Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh, however, blamed the media for distorting facts, without even admitting that Mayawati had proposed to merge the land of the Ambedkar Sports Complex with the adjoining 108-acre Ambedkar Park, a dream project that she built for a whopping Rs.1.5 billion during her second stint as chief minister in the mid-90s.
“Members of the cabinet were informed about the actual developments which did not include any demolition,” Singh told reporters.
“No demolition was on the cards at all. The sports complex has been thrown open to all and sundry in the same manner as it was before.”
He, however, said the government has not planned anything so far regarding the land belonging to the sports complex.
The cabinet secretary emphasised that the government had already allocated 50 acres of land on the city’s outskirts for development of an “international class sports facility”.
Reiterating what the chief minister had already stated in the state assembly, Singh said: “The administration wanted to vacate the premises and sanitise the place in the wake of terrorist threat.”
Attributing the “terrorist threat” to “reports by intelligence agencies”, he said, “a decision had been taken to shift all sports facilities to K.D. Singh Babu Stadium as a stop-gap arrangement.”
Asked to explain the presence of bulldozers in the sport complex Tuesday night when officials were forcing sports department employees to leave the complex, he said, “the bulldozers were there to carry out some excavation work on a storm water drain outside the complex, which created confusion.”