The Samajwadi Party is getting isolated in Uttar Pradesh following the Muzaffarnagar riots. While the Congress party on Wednesday demanded chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s resignation for failing to check the riots, the Opposition BJP and BSP sharpening their attack on the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led party.
Although a section of the Congress feels that the riots took place due to factional fights among the senior SP leaders, these incidents have certainly marred Mulayam Singh Yadav’s prospects as a leader of “third front”.
Meanwhile, the Congress accused the SP of “total failure” in fulfilling its responsibility to check communal riots in western UP as a sting operation showed two police officers reportedly admitting having delayed action to contain the violence under “political pressure”.
AICC spokesperson Meem Afzal, at the same time, said that it was “not a Muslim or non-Muslim issue and it needs to be examined what orders were given, when cops have said certain things”.
He was replying to a question about the sting operation purportedly putting a particular community in bad light over the riots when they were victims. “The UP government has failed. People of western UP say that this was the biggest communal riots there after 1992 (during Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy). There is total failure of the government,” he said.
... Arrests should have happened much earlier. The government has shown complete negligence,” Mr Afzal said.
He also said that the “situation is under control now” and that it is the responsibility of the people in the affected areas to come together and create an atmosphere of brotherhood.
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Seemandhra Ministers, MPs: reconsider T-move
New Delhi, Sept. 18: Central ministers and MPs from Seemandhra region on Wednesday met senior Congress leaders Veerappa Moily and Ahmed Patel and asked them to reconsider the Congress Working Committe (CWC) decision to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh.
Both Mr Moily and Mr Patel are members of an AICC Committee headed by A.K. Antony to look into grienvances arising out of formation of Telangana state.
“I hope they will reconsider CWC decision,” Union minister K.S. Rao said after the meeting with Mr Moily.
The Congress leaders briefed Mr Moily and Mr Patel about the continued protests in Seemandhra regions against the decision to carve out the new state from Andhra Pradesh.
“I told him about the 50 days agitation in Seemandhra region after CWC decision and told him that due to the CWC decision, people are agitated in the region and employees are on strike,” he said.
— PTI