Lucknow, February 24
Taking considerable wind out of the Samajwadi party sails, BSP president Mayawati today announced the resignation of her 63 sitting MLAs along with 11 more defecting MLAs to protest the “delay in dismissing the unconstitutional Mulayam Singh Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh”.
However, the other political parties, the BJP and the Congress, refused to respond to the BSP initiative of corning the SP and declared that they would “announce their strategy only on Monday”.
With the exit of these 87 MLAs (63 sitting, 13 disqualified by SC judgement and 11 defectors) the effective strength of the House has come down to 296.
In this changed scenario, the SP would require the support of 149 MLAs to prove its majority, which may seem like a cakewalk considering that it has 152 MLAs of its own.
While Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav may shrug off the latest BSP move as yet another pressure tactics, the development certainly undermines the rapidly declining legitimacy of his government.
Among the 11 sitting MLAs who joined hands with the BSP today, five are from the BJP, four of the SP and two independents. The nine MLAs belonging to the political parties may not have technically joined the BSP till
now but for all practical purpose they were with the party for the past several months.
Speaker Mata Prasad Pandey had disqualified four SP MLAs for cross voting during the Rajya Sabha election in June 2006. However, the Allahabad High Court had allowed them to continue in the House without voting rights.
Addressing the mediapersons after a strategy meeting with her MLAs and senior office-bearers, Mayawati lashed out at the speaker for undermining the spirit of the Constitution by “functioning like a party representative who is always present on the party platforms”.
She said despite repeated requests to him he was not publishing the latest party position in the House in the light of the Supreme Court judgement of February 14 and was hell bent on going ahead with proving the SP’s majority where “in all likelihood the 24 former BSP MLAs would be allowed to vote.” Not sparing the Congress and CPM either, she said the Congress had visibly succumbed to the pressure of its UPA ally CPM, an ally which did not object to the imposition of President’s rule in Bihar.
The BSP supremo also cited the present Assembly completing its five-year term on February 25 as one of the reasons for the resignation of her MLAs.
According to her, the resignation letters of all MLAs had mentioned the “unconstitutional role of former Speaker Keshari Nath Tripathi in forming this illegitimate government and the Congress and Rashtriya Lok Dal in sustaining it”.
Leader of the opposition Lalji Tandon refusing to toe Mayawati’s line of action charged her of giving the SP “a walkover for the proposed floor test”.
He said if the opposition had shown any unity of purpose, it could have given a decisive defeat to the ruling party.
Hitting out at the Congress for not dismissing the present government that had lost the moral right to rule, Tandon flayed the convening of a session when elections had already been announced and there was no agenda before the House.
Leader of the Congress party in the Vidhan Sabha Pramod Tewari said his party would announce their floor strategy on February 26.
