Taking strong exception to Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh's criticism of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati's fad for her personal statues and monuments, the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh has termed the tirade as a "reflection of the Congress party's anti-dalit mentality."
Reacting to Singh's statement, an unnamed BSP spokesman (sounding more like Mayawati herself) issued a stinging rejoinder on Sunday evening, not only condemning the Congress on various counts but also threatening "to teach the Congress a lesson at the forthcoming 2012 state assembly election."
Claiming that the installation of Mayawati's statues was being done in fulfillment of her political mentor and BSP founder Kanshi Ram's last wishes, the press statement said, "Congress leaders see nothing wrong about the erection of statues and monuments after various members of the Gandhi-Nehru family all over the country, but they have serious objection to a few monuments built by me to commemorate those great social reformers who championed the cause of downtrodden dalits".
He went on to add, "The UP chief minister has no craving to get her own statues installed; what has been done was to uphold the wishes of the late Kandhi Ram, who had explicitly spelt it out in his written will that her statues be installed in every memorial erected in his honour or in memory of other dalit icons."
With a view to justifying the expenditure of over Rs. 6000 crores on these memorials and statues in Lucknow, and in Noida, the spokesman sought to claim, "The Congress leader is clearly trying to mislead the public by giving a false impression that lots of money has gone into those constructions when the fact remains that the expenditure was not more than one percent of the each year's budget." Significantly, UP's annual budget was of the order of Rs. 165,000 crores.
Reacting to the corruption charge against Mayawati, the BSP spokesman felt that it was high time for the Congress leader to realise that those who lived in glass houses should not throw stones. "Digvijay has no business making wild accusation of corruption against the BSP government when his own Congress-led United Progressive Alliance regime was neck-deep in various scams including 2G, 3G and Commonwealth games bungling," the spokesman pointed out.
