Samajwadi Party (SP) president Mulayam Singh will play truant to the Telangana process, if at all the Congress is seriously mulling the idea of carving a separate Telangana. At a late Sunday Iftar party in Bangalore with a select gathering, including politicians, celebrities and religious leaders, his son and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party patriarch said that the UPA would go on dividing the country into different pieces, if it was let separate Telangana. He said that his party was opposed to the creation of a separate Telangana.
Many such demands for smaller states would mushroom. Smaller States would not augur well for the development of the country and a separate Telangana could also be dogged by the same problems as that of the ones confronted by the recently-created States of Chattisgarh, Uttara Khand and Jharkhand.
To a query what his party’s stand if a Bill on Telangana was moved in the Parliament, Mulayam Singh Yadav asserted that his party would oppose it. This is where the catch of the Congress-mark politics lie.
Close on the heels of the news that the Centre chose to close down the CBI cases against Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav, the Uttar Pradesh strongman came with a statement. This surreptitiously emboldens the Congress high command to convince its Telangana protagonists not to press as the party was not in a position to get the Bill passed in the Parliament. Even though the BJP has for long been saying that it would support the Bill, if introduced in the Parliament, the Congress would not accede to such a demand.
The Congress would take refuge in Mulayam’s opposition to the creation of Telangana, even though another UP leader Mayawati was in favour of Telangana. She has been demanding the creation of Poorvanchal, Uttaranchal, Bundelkhand, etc. This is the new twist to the whole drama that is unfolding every minute. Though Mulayam Singh’s SP is not a part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), its 22 votes would become critical for the passage of the Bill, for the UPA to pass the Telangana Bill.
“Netaji’s (Mulayam) son and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and three lawmakers from the northern state also participated in the evening prayers (Namaz-e-Mughrib) and joined the Iftar dinner at a star hotel,” a party spokesman told INN. Mulayam Singh and his son are on a two-day visit to Karnataka at the invitation of his party’s only lawmaker C.P. Yogeeshwara, who got elected to the state legislative assembly from his home constituency Chennapatna, about 50 km from Bangalore.
Among the state leaders present along with 200 other guests were former Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, former Congress central minister Jaffer Sharief, former Congress state minister Roshan Baig, Congress lawmaker Ajay Singh, son of former state chief minister N. Dharam Singh and the state unit’s Youth Congress president Rizwan Arshad. At a brief interaction with media after the namaz, Mulayam Singh claimed without the support of his party, no government could be formed at the centre after the next parliamentary elections.
“We are working hard to get as many Lok Sabha seats as possible, as no government can be formed without our party’s support at the centre,” Mulayam Singh said responding to BJP leader L.K. Advani’s claim that the party-led National Democratic Alliance would break all poll records. Declining to comment on the alleged increasing atrocities against women in his home state, Mulayam Singh sought to play down the issue saying the incidents were being blown out of proportion.
Referring indirectly to the number crimes and rapes in the national capital (New Delhi), Mulayam Singh said people across the country and the world knew where the maximum atrocities against women happen in India. “The college student who died after her gruesome rape in New Delhi (Dec 16, 2012) was from Uttar Pradesh. Has anyone seen such a heinous crime in Uttar Pradesh. No, because law and order is maintained well in the state. Our government is performing well and better than other governments,” Mulayam Singh said.
