By IANS,
Lucknow : Ruling out demanding imposition of President’s rule in Uttar Pradesh, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh Sunday said his party would concentrate on highlighting Chief Minister Mayawati’s “misgovernance and misdeeds”.
He also reiterated the Congress’ demand for a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the arson attack on party’s state unit chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi’s Lucknow house, allegedly masterminded by Mayawati herself.
“We have no faith in the CID (criminal investigation department) probe ordered by the state government, therefore we have also taken recourse to judicial intervention and are waiting for the high court’s verdict on the issue,” he said at a press conference at the party office here.
Asked if the burning of the state Congress chief’s president’s house by Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) goons was not reason enough to clamp President’s rule in the state, Singh said: “Well, for that there needs to be a total breakdown of constitutional machinery. In any case, we are against the idea of disrupting the democratic process through which Mayawati has been given the people’s mandate for five years.”
He said their objective was to vote out the Mayawati government in the next state assembly elections by telling the people how she was ruining the state and targeting Congress party workers.
Singh said party activists would fan out all across the state to tell the people how the Mayawati government was misusing and pilfering funds allocated by the central government for development. He also alleged that she was blatantly discriminating against the areas where people had opted for Congress nominees.
Referring to the Uttar Pradesh government’s demand for a special drought relief package, he said: “There is no semblance of logic in the demand raised and it appears that Mayawati is oblivious of ground reality and guided by a coterie.”
“Take for example, the Uttar Pradesh government’s latest demand for 25,000 quintals of certified seeds. This is a highly inflated figure as this very government had earlier demanded only about 800 quintals of certified seeds and by no stretch of imagination, the actual demand could have gone up so high,” he said.
Singh said the central government is sensitive to drought and all other natural calamities and would definitely send a team to make an assessment and see that the people of the state get their due. “But what hurts the centre is gross misuse and misutilisation of funds.”
Taking another dig at the chief minister, he said: “I have read that Mayawati is issuing a booklet containing the achievements of her two-year-old rule… though we have yet to receive a copy, I wish to tell her that we would also prepare an account of her failures and present it to the people of the state.”
Asked his reaction to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)’s report, giving a clean chit to Delhi Police in the Batla House gun battle September last year, Singh said: “It has been brought to my knowledge that some of the aggrieved persons were not given an opportunity to be heard. That is true and we would urge the NHRC to take another look at the issue.”