National

Shukla's charge against Ajit Jogi

By Aarti Dhar

NEW DELHI APRIL 19. The newly-appointed State chief of the Nationalist Congress Party, V.C. Shukla, said today that the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi's "obsession" with the Chhattisgarh Chief Minister, Ajit Jogi, had led to suffocation in the party, at both the Centre and the State.

Talking to The Hindu here on Friday, Mr. Shukla said several senior Congress leaders including Shyama Charan Shukla and Moti Lal Vora had spoken to Ms. Gandhi about the functioning of Mr. Jogi but she seemed unmoved. In fact, an NCP delegation also met the Chhattisgarh Governor, Dinesh Nandan Sahaya, at Raipur recently and apprised him of the manner in which the Chief Minister administered the State but he, too, was non-committal on any issue. They also presented him a list of bureaucrats who were behaving like political workers so that it could be brought to the notice of the Centre and appropriate action taken against them because they were answerable to the Central Government. "One has to be subservient to the Chief Minister or else he is made to pay for speaking out. This is true for the bureaucrats and the party workers," Mr. Shukla said.

Now that the NCP has announced its arrival in a big way, Mr. Shukla believes that it would emerge as the "third political force" in the State, making the contest triangular in the Assembly elections.

Hopeful of winning close to 50 seats in the elections scheduled for November, Mr. Shukla said he himself would not contest this time round.

The NCP would field its candidates for all the 90 Assembly segments and expected to win around 50 seats.

He would think in terms of contesting after the performance of his party. The situation in the Bharatiya Janata Party was no better. There was opposition against the leadership as a result of which the voters did not take the party seriously anymore, he said adding they were only banking for victory in Chhattisgarh on a division in the Congress.

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