By Rakesh Mohan Chaturvedi, IANS
Lucknow : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has declared war on the Congress-led central government over the increasing terror attacks in her sprawling state.
Huge cardboard hoardings have come up all over Lucknow blaming the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for the terrorist strikes that have claimed several lives.
This is seen as the first out-in-the-open battle between the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) since Mayawati took power in May 2007.
Mayawati’s hoardings accuse the UPA government of being lax in taking adequate measures to check terrorist activities in the country. They allege that the central intelligence agencies have failed to check terrorists.
They go on to state that the failure of the central government in stopping infiltration of terrorists through the international borders has led to terrorist strikes in Uttar Pradesh. The attack on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Group Centre at the edge of Rampur town Jan 1 is attributed to this “failure”.
Uttar Pradesh has seen a spate of terror attacks in the last few months. On Nov 23, 2007, bomb blasts took place in the crowded district courts of Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi killing around 20 people.
A number of Pakistan-trained operatives have been arrested or killed in gun battles in the state.
The Rampur attack, in which a group of two or probably four armed gunmen shot dead seven CRPF personnel in groups and also a civilian, has brought the simmering tensions between the central and state governments out in the open.
“The CRPF personnel should have been more careful when they had been given prior warning about the attack,” Mayawati said, referring to reports attributed to intelligence sources that warnings about a possible terror strike had been conveyed to the paramilitary force last month.
Defending the central government, Uttar Pradesh Congress spokesperson Akhilesh Kumar Singh told IANS: “Why did she not take any action if her government also knew of the attack in Rampur? The CRPF men may have failed but so did her government.”
The hoardings further accuse the central government of not providing enough financial aid to the state, the country’s most populous state with 166 million people.
The grim power situation in the state and other problems plaguing it have all been linked to the Congress-led central government’s policies and “step-brotherly treatment”.
The hoardings are being seen as the end of whatever honeymoon the Congress and the BSP had, at least in recent years, and signify that they are unlikely to embrace each other in the coming times.
The two parties had courted each other after Mayawati came to power. “We did get her support in the presidential elections. But that was it,” said a senior Congress leader.
In lieu of the support, the UPA had gone soft on the Rs.75 crore (Rs.750 million) corruption scandal involving Mayawati in the building of the Taj Heritage Corridor in Agra.
But things began to sour when the BSP furiously started eating into the traditional vote share of the Congress and came to be seen as a formidable, long-term threat.
Because of the BSP, which managed to attract a very large number of Dalit votes, the Congress lost many seats in Delhi’s municipal elections last year.
The BSP failed to win any seat in Gujarat and won just one in Himachal Pradesh in the December elections but in both places it seriously damaged the Congress prospects.