By IANS,
Lucknow : Samajwadi party members and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) legislators Thursday traded charges in the assembly here, accusing one another of trying to hoodwink the backwards castes.
Answering a question by BJP’s Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti on what was the delay in including some castes in the list of Scheduled Castes, Social Welfare Minister Avdhesh Prasad said a sub-committee had been formed by the chief minister. In two months he will be submitting his recommendations.
Opposition leader and BSP leader Swamy Prasad Maurya said once the house had passed a resolution and sent it to the central government, all talk of a sub-committee was an attempt to hoodwink these castes.
The castes in question include the Nishad, Mallah, Kewat, Bind and Kashyap.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Hukum Singh seconded Maurya and said that if the government was serious about bringing these castes under the ambit of Dalits, pressure should be mounted on the central government.
“The central government is dependent on SP, why don’t you ask the government to do the needful?” he said.
To this, Urban Development and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Azam Khan retorted by saying that the SP was supporting the UPA government only to stop the BJP from coming to power.