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'Kalyan Singh was adopting a Hitlerian attitude in running the administration'

Uttar Pradesh Loktantrik Congress leader and state Energy Minister Naresh Agrawal on Saturday accused Chief Minister Kalyan Singh of trying to split his party which has 22 members in the Vidhan Sabha.

Talking to newspersons after announcing his party's decision to withdraw support to the government, he said Kalyan Singh had not implemented the agreement reached with the Loktantrik Congress at the time of government formation.

''He neither fulfilled the commitments towards the people nor succeeded in checking crime or implementing public welfare schemes,'' Agrawal alleged, ''For the last fortnight, Kalyan Singh was adopting a Hitlerian attitude in running the administration."

Asked whether he had apprised the chief minister about his apprehensions, Agrawal replied in the affirmative. ''We had been telling him about our feelings for the past two or three months,'' he said.

Agrawal claimed that Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav, state Janata Dal chief Ram Singh and Bharatiya Kisan Kamgar Party legislature group leader Kaukab Hamid has given in writing their decision to support the proposed secular government under Loktantrik Congress leader Jagdambika Pal.

He claimed his party and its allies enjoyed the support of over 240 Vidhan Sabha members.

Meanwhile, Congress general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad said his party would strive to form a non-Bharatiya Janata Party government in UP.

Reacting to the UP developments, Azad said the Congress would not seek Kalyan Singh's resignation because the government, in any case, would fall on its own. The governor had the onerous task of fulfilling his constitutional responsibility, and it was he who has to decide whether the chief minister should resign or be dismissed.

These developments also revealed that the BJP was fighting a 'losing battle' in the conquest of Delhi and that the Congress was inching towards a two-third majority from a mere simple majority, he claimed.

The message was loud and clear from the BJP's allies that the saffron party was not a 'winning horse' any more, Azad claimed.

He said the developments that started in Gujarat has now reached UP. Other states like Rajasthan and Maharashtra, where the BJP was depending on 'borrowed strength', would follow the 'UP way.'

The BJP, he continued, which hoped that the Congress would crumble 'brick by brick' was now finding that the whole roof had collapsed. Its stability card would not hold in Rajasthan and Maharashtra because there was rethinking on the part of Independent MLAs.

He said people's pressure and the extraordinary response which Sonia Gandhi's campaign received had all contributed to the imminent fall of the UP government. The BJP, which raised several issues including corruption and criminalisation of politics, had gone on changing issues every week and have ended up 'issueless' during the run-up to the poll.

The United Front's reaction to the UP crisis, spelt out through Communist Party of India-Marxist veteran Harkishen Singh Surjeet, was that the BJP was reaping the 'rewards of horse-trading'.

''(The BJP should) draw lessons from the incident -- that it cannot go against the verdict of the people,'' he said, ''(Now they stand) thoroughly exposed as a party which is trying to project itself as 'principled' but in fact has neither scruples nor principles."

The happenings in UP had implications everywhere in the country because of the BJP's bid for power at the Centre, Surjeet said. ''All this is the logical result of the communalisation of politics by the BJP,'' he said.

UNI

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