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Mulayam dares Centre to sack Rabri Devi

Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha president Mulayam Singh Yadav today dared the Centre to sack the Rabri Devi government in Bihar, and said such a blunder ''would have a serious political fallout".

Mulayam Yadav said the dismissal of a duly elected government would lead to chaos.

Asked about Samata Party leader and Railway Minister Nitish Kumar's statement that the Rabri Devi government's days were numbered, he said those who know the people's pulse in Bihar would never recommend the government's removal.

Giving a clean chit to Rabri Devi's governance, he said the ''law and order in Bihar is the best'', and added that the situation in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states was deplorable.

Mulayam Yadav said the overall situation in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh had deteriorated and the Centre was maintaining a stoic silence over those states.

The Samajwadi Party chief demanded the removal of the Kalyan Singh government in Up, accusing it of gunning down innocent persons in fake encounters. According to him, more than 200 people have been shot dead in these fake encounters.

The SP is holding a rally in Muzaffarnagar on September 8 to protest the killing of four Muslim youth by the police on July 26.

He presented before the press a mason named Farmood who, he said, had managed to escape from the clutches of the trigger-happy cops.

Farmood said he and four friends from Meerut had gone to Muzaffarnagar. On the way back they were stopped by the police who killed his friends in cold blood after branding them as dacoits.

Mulayam Yadav, who demanded the registration of a case under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code against the policemen involved in the killings regretted that Kalyan Singh, instead of quitting the CM's post on moral grounds, was trying to hush up the matter. The inspector at the Jansath police station involved in the crime had not even been suspended so far, the SP leader said.

The SP will take up the matter with the National Human Rights Commission chairman who has already issued a notice to the state government. The NHRC will hear the case next week.

Amar Singh, the RLM spokesman, referred to recent protests by the Swadeshi Jagran Manch against the government's policies and said the outcry by the SJM was a case of shedding ''crocodile tears''.

He wondered how the SJM could delink itself from economic policies adopted by the Vajpayee government.

A three-member RLM committee is preparing a detailed note on industry and economy during the Vajpayee regime to highlight before President K R Narayanan, the prime minister and finance minister, the fallout of the new policies on the country's economy.

Singh described the recently constituted advisory council on industry and trade as a ''patronising council.'' He said some of those kept on the council were defaulters and owed millions of rupees to the government on various counts.

He demanded that the Reserve Bank of India issued a white paper on industries being run by council members with details of their balance sheets.

Singh said that the withdrawal of the Tatas from the Rs 14.75 billion domestic airline project was just an ''eyewash'', as the company was all set to come back with a bang through revival of the Singapore-Tata Airline project, taking benefit of the Disinvestment Commission's recommendation to divest Air-India equity.

He said the BJP government had allowed 100 per cent FDI in cigarette companies and wondered whether it was in line with the ruling coalition's swadeshi plank.

UNI

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