By IANS,
Lucknow : Taking strong exception to Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh’s criticism of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati for building her own statues and monuments, the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) Sunday has termed the tirade a “reflection of the Congress party’s anti-Dalit mentality”.
Close on the heels of Digvijay Singh’s statement, an unnamed BSP spokesman issued a statement not only condemning the Congress but also threatening “to teach the Congress a lesson at the 2012 state assembly election”.
Claiming that the installation of Mayawati’s statues was being done to fulfil her political mentor and BSP founder Kanshi Ram’s last wish, the statement said: “The Congress leaders see nothing wrong about the erection of statues and monuments after various members of the Gandhi-Nehru family all over the country, but they have serious objection to a few monuments built by me to commemorate those great social reformers who championed the cause of the downtrodden Dalits.”
“The Uttar Pradesh chief minister has no craving to get her own statues installed; what has been done was to uphold the wishes of late Kanshi Ram, who explicitly spelt it out in his written will that her statues be installed in every memorial erected in his honour or in the memory of other Dalit icons.”
With a view to justifying the expenditure of over Rs.6,000 crore on these memorials and statues in Lucknow and Noida, the spokesman said “the Congress leader is clearly trying to mislead the public by giving a false impression that lots of money has gone into those constructions when fact remains that the expenditure was not more than one percent of the each year’s budget.”
Significantly, the state’s annual budget was of the order of Rs.165,000 crore.
Reacting to the corruption charge against Mayawati, the BSP spokesman said: “Digvijay (Singh) had no business to make wild accusation of corruption against the BSP government, when his own Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) regime was neck-deep in various scams including 2G (second generation), 3G and Commonwealth Games bungling.”