Angry with Rao, Kalpnath Rai threatens to commit suicide

Kalpnath Rai says he will commit suicide if he is kept in prison any longer. The former federal minister says he is disillusioned with Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao who, he says, will go to any extreme to humiliate him.

In a meeting with members of his family, from behind bars on Monday, Rai sobbed when he could not pick up his youngest daughter. Angrily, he could be heard saying "that @#*#@ is having fun and marrying off his grandson in style. Here I cannot even touch my child."

"I will end my life to prove myself innocent and to wipe the Congress out from the country," Rai declared. His family consoled him, saying "Aap ko to desh ki seva karni hai,"(you have to serve the country).

Rai is a TADA detenue and lives in a cell, next to 'Babloo' Srivastava, the notorious gangster. Virendra Pant, another TADA accused and a Srivastava associate, claimed in a telephone conversation from Tihar jail that Rai warned his former private secretary Sanjay the other day that he should tell the court he organised the stay of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim's men at the National Thermal Power Corporation guesthouse on his own. Sanjay, Pant claimed, did not say a word and was swiftly escorted out of the prison by the jail staff.

He wants his son-in-law Mukti Nath Upadhyay to enter politics and contest the next election from Betiah, Bihar, on a Bharatiya Janata Party ticket. Upadhyay is a former press adviser of Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and presently works with the Mizoram government.

Rai has sent feelers to the BJP and other parties about his own political future. He says he will expose Rao and is available to all parties for this purpose. Whether any party would want to be associated with him is another matter altogether.