The Hindu : SP for roping in Cong. to dislodge U.P. Govt.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Oct 22, 2002

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SP for roping in Cong. to dislodge U.P. Govt.

By Our New Delhi Bureau

NEW DELHI OCT. 21. Political cauldron in Uttar Pradesh appears to be on the boil again with problems in the parties to the ruling coalition — open dissidence in the Bharatiya Janata Party and discontent in the Bahujan Samaj Party — and the Samajwadi Party (SP) making it plain today that it is eager to dislodge the Mayawati-led Government.

At the same time, the SP stressed that the onus was on the Congress in Uttar Pradesh since, without its help the next government could not be formed in Lucknow. "The onus lies with the Congress,'' the party general secretary, Amar Singh, told correspondents after a meeting of its Parliamentary Board here chaired by the SP president, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The SP leaders said they had received feelers from the BJP's dissidents. Mr. Singh also confirmed that a meeting with the Rashtriya Kranti Party chief, Kalyan Singh, had taken place.

The arithmetic in the U.P. Assembly shows that the strength of those staunchly opposed to the BSP-BJP Government stands at roughly 180 in a House of 401. The SP feels that if the Congress joins the bid to remove the Mayawati Government, it could add another 20 to 25 MLAs from both the BJP and the BSP camps.

The BJP has taken a serious note of these developments. Today, it indirectly accepted that the dissent by half-a-dozen MLAs in Uttar Pradesh had become a major problem and that if they persisted in what was being seen as anti-party activity, strong disciplinary action would follow.

The BJP spokesperson, Arun Jaitley, said that the party president, Venkaiah Naidu, had asked the `prabhari' for U.P., Kalraj Mishra — who is "in-charge'' of the party's political affairs in the State — to speak to the dissidents to dissuade them from continuing to vent their grievances in public.

If they persisted, the BJP would view it "very seriously'' and take disciplinary action.

Discipline was a subject that the Deputy Prime Minister, L. K. Advani, had touched upon during the two-day party conclave in Mumbai, which concluded on Monday, and it seems that the U.P. issue figured prominently in the discussions among the top party leaders.

The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, refused to meet the dissidents on Sunday during his two-day visit to Lucknow, and there was speculation that his sudden cancellation of programmes was less due to a "sore throat'' and had more to do with dissidence.

The main grievance of the BJP dissidents in U.P. is that they have been excluded from Ministerial berths although some of them have been members of the party for decades and have won from their Assembly constituencies several times. They feel that "less-deserving MLAs" have been made Ministers. And besides the open dissenters, there are many important U.P. leaders of the BJP who continue to believe that the coalition with the BSP has harmed the party.

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