Mayawati unveils Rs 684-crore park in Noida
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and BSP supremo Mayawati on Friday termed the Congress 'anti-dalit' and said that it was so scared of her that it could make a dalit the prime minister.
Mayawati also accused the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi of not fulfilling her promise to help in the disproportionate assets (DA) case against her (Mayawati), currently pending in the Delhi High Court.
“Congress suffers from anti-dalit mentality and it has no respect for the dalit icons…it has become so scared of the scams and me that it could make Sushil Kumar Shinde or Meira Kumar (both dalits) the prime minister reluctantly in a bid to garner the support of the dalits in the next UP Assembly polls’’, Mayawati claimed, speaking after inaugurating a Rs 684-crore park at Noida to commemorate dalit icons. She charged the Congress with ignoring the dalit icons.
“There are many memorials and statues of Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and others but the Congress never got memorials constructed after dalit icons’’, she said adding that the there were many statues of Congress leaders to the west of Yamuna. “Now there are statues of dalit icons to the east of Yamuna”, she said.
Mayawati also accused Congress president Sonia Gandhi of backtracking on her promise to help her (Mayawati) in the DA case.
“Sonia Gandhi had telephoned me in 2003 after the then BJP government got the CBI to raid the residences of my relatives and registered a DA case against me and promised that justice will be done to me when the Congress forms government at the Centre”, she claimed. “For the past seven years the Congress has been in power at the Centre but the DA case is still on despite the fact that the income tax department has given me a clean chit,” she said.
She also slammed the ongoing rath yatras by the BJP leaders L K Advani, Rajnath Singh and Kalraj Mishra. “The BJP should have launched its rath yatra from Karnataka rather than Bihar,” she said in a sarcastic vein referring apparently to the scams during the regime of B S Yeddyurappa.
The BSP supremo also advocated for trifurcation of UP making eastern, Bundelkhand and western region separate states.
The grand park has been constructed on 82 acres and has statues of 24 elephants, the BSP election symbol, Dalit icons like B R Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram and of herself.
The Congress slammed the chief minister for “wasting public money on grandiose projects” instead of providing basic needs like health, education and irrigation to the people.
“The BSP government has been spending public money on non-essential things when the state has worst indices of infant mortality and education,” Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari told a news channel.
