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NCP floats alliance sans Samajwadi

Atiq Khan

Ajit Singh will be Chief Ministerial candidate if RLD were to join group

LUCKNOW: The Nationalist Congress Party has taken the initiative to form a broadest possible alliance of secular parties in Uttar Pradesh for next year's State Assembly elections. The secular alliance would include the Congress but exclude the Samajwadi Party. The move has been proposed to beat back the challenge of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The NCP had also suggested that if Rashtriya Lok Dal, which is currently an ally of the Samajwadi party in U.P., were to join the coalition its president Chaudhary Ajit Singh would be projected as the Chief Ministerial candidate. The thinking in NCP circles is that if Mr. Singh were to join he would be the biggest leader in the coalition, and, more importantly, he enjoys a rich political legacy of Charan Singh with a strong appeal among the farmers and the minorities.

These issues figured prominently at the two-day national convention of the NCP which concluded in Dehra Dun this past Sunday.

The exclusion of Samajwadi Party from the broad secular alliance proposed by the NCP would seem surprising considering that the coalition would include smaller secular parties in the context of U.P. like the CPI, CPI (M), CPI (M-L), Jan Morcha and Progressive Democratic Front with the NCP leadership also sending feelers to the Congress and the RLD.

"UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav cannot be faulted for his impeccable secular credentials, yet of late there have been some aberrations which seemed to suggest that he was soft on BJP", said Ramesh Dixit, State unit president of the NCP.

Dr. Dixit told The Hindu that Mr. Yadav did not realise the BJP was capable of raising any issue from Mathura to Kashi and Ayodhya.

He said that the Mumbai blast case judgment was being delivered 13 years after the incident but the accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case including L. K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati were yet to be booked a full 14 years after the demolition of the mosque.

"The NCP strongly feels that Mr. Yadav's government should reopen the Babri Masjid case by filing a fresh petition and the Chief Minister should stop hobnobbing with leaders like George Fernandes,'' he added.

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