Willing to wound but afraid to strike

Development has become a serious casualty due to the confrontation between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh                                                          

Pradeep Kapoor Lucknow

Confronting each other on a day- to-day basis yet not withdrawing support from each other at the Centre as well in the State describes the relationship between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress, where neither wants to be seen as upsetting the apple cart of secular governance. Unfortunately, this has led to Uttar Pradesh (UP) losing out in terms of development.

On several occasions, the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Salman Khurshid dared SP national president and Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and his right-hand man, Amar Singh, to withdraw support from the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Likewise, SP bosses challenged rivals to pull out support, but fearing loss of Muslim support nobody wants to take the initiative. Mulayam Singh, in the presence of CPI (M) general secretary, Prakash Karat, accused the Congress of conspiring to dislodge his government.

The battle between the SP and the Congress is basically for the 18 per cent Muslim vote-bank that plays a crucial role in every successive election. The traditional support of Muslim votes to the Congress was snatched away by the SP after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. The Congress, for its part, believes that the Muslims could return to its fold if the SP could be shown as a non-delivering party.

That is why Congress and SP leaders project each other as pro-BJP to win over Muslims. The issue of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University for Urdu and Persian at Rampur thus was utilised by the SP as well as the Congress to run down each other. SP leaders, including Mulayam and state cabinet minister Azam Khan, blamed the Congress for not allowing the government to set up the Mohammad Ali Jauhar University for Urdu and Persian languages even after a Bill was passed twice by the UP Assembly.

SP leaders said Governor TV Rajeshwar was working under the instruction of the Congress leadership to prevent the university being set up, as the credit would go to the Mulayam government. On the other hand, Congress leaders including UPCC president, Salman Khurshid, maintained that they were not against setting up of the university per se but were only opposed to cabinet minister Azam Khan becoming pro-chancellor for life.

Now that the Governor has given his assent to the Bill for setting up a private university by the name of Maulana Ali Jauhar at Rampur, Khurshid said when Congress came to power Azam Khan would be removed from the post of life pro-chancellor. Azam Khan is now full of praise for the Governor and blamed Congress leaders for giving wrong information about the university to Raj Bhawan.

The differences continue. Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh blamed Sonia Gandhi for being responsible for the disqualification of membership of Jaya Bachchan from the Rajya Sabha and for the income tax notices being served to Amitabh Bachchan, and raising the issue of property of the chief minister and his family members in the Supreme Court as part of a larger strategy to attack the SP. After all, the person who brought the public interest litigation Vishwanath Mohan Chaturvedi was a Congressman.

Congress has utilised the visit of Mulayam to the ashram of veteran RSS leader Nanaji Deshmukh during his party meeting at Chitrakoot to allege that there was a secret understanding between the SP and the Sangh Parivar.  The Mulayam government was also blamed for not issuing fresh notification for the trial of LK Advani and others in the Babri demolition case as Mulayam has a soft corner for BJP leaders.

However, development is the major battleground for the strife between the SP and the Congress. During her first visit to Rae Bareilly on June 17 and 18 after she won her seat in a bye-poll, Congress President Sonia Gandhi lambasted Mulayam for adopting discrimination in power supply and ignoring development. She told the media that she had received complaints from her people that they were being punished for supporting her and had to face frequent power cuts.

Countering these charges as “baseless”, Mulayam stated that there wer no power cuts in Rae Bareilly while addressing a public rally in Etawah on June 20, adding that 24-hour supply was being given to urban areas with 14 hours for the rural areas of Rae Bareilly.

As for her charges on development, Mulayam denied that Rae Bareilly was being ignored as a package of over Rs 1,100 crore had been given to that constituency, much more than the amount sanctioned for Etawah, Mainpuri, Badaun and Agra.

The formation of UP Development Council (UPDC) headed by Amar Singh has been another flashpoint for the Congress and the SP. The Chief Minister and Amar Singh have claimed that UPDC so far has secured investment commitments from leading corporate houses to the tune of Rs 40,000 crore. According to them, Anil Ambani alone was investing Rs 10,000 crore in a power plant near Dadri while the House of Bajaj had already invested Rs 15,000 crore in the sugar industry. UPDC had also brought Kumarmangalam Birla and others to invest in the state.

Congress, for its part, remains unimpressed by these claims. Salman Khurshid has repeatedly stated that the investments touted by the Mulayam government remain on paper and charged it with selectively helping only a few industrial houses by changing government norms. According to him, the state was not going to benefit by the UPDC, which was set up as an extra-constitutional authority to help a few industrial houses close to SP leaders; that senior UPDC bureaucrats were touring abroad frequently at government expense in the name of bringing investment while the net result had been only zero.

The recent issue of distribution of unemployment dole of Rs 500 per person also set the Congress and the SP at each other’s throats. On June 13, while distributing cheques of Rs 1,000 as dole to cover months of April-May Mulayam blamed the Congress and the UPA government for ignoring his genuine demand for additional funds. It is worth recollecting that the chief minister fulfilled his election manifesto promise regarding the unemployment dole for which a sum of Rs 400 crore was budgeted for.

The Chief Minister said that he had sent a proposal for Rs 500 crore to the Centre for funding the unemployment dole but it was rejected by the latter as a meaningless exercise. In a gesture of political one-upmanship, the Chief Minister announced that he would give unemployment dole to youths all over the country and would double the amount if voted back to power. On the other hand, Salman Khurshid said that this allowance should be given when opportunities for employment fail and not as a substitute, adding that what Mulayam did on June 16 was only a distribution of booth-capturing allowance.

In this saga of ongoing confrontation, Congress leaders have also alleged that Mulayam Singh was not interested in implementing the National Gramin Rojgar Yojna (NGRY), an ambitious scheme of the UPA government. The scheme that assures 100 days of work to the unemployed in rural parts of the country has been rocked by charges of  rampant corruption in several districts where block development officers were accepting money from poor villagers for giving work under NGRY. The state's development has become a casualty of this process of political confrontation between the center and state.