Cong Under No Compulsion To Support Uf, Says Kesari

Agar wo samajhate hain ki ye hamari lachari thi, to wo murkha hain. Unme rajanitik gyan nahi hain, (if they feel that our support is out of compulsions, then they are fools and lack political knowledge), he asserted.

In his half-hour speech, Kesari said he was aware that the United Front has lot of misconceptions about why Congress has extended support to its government. He said the party would continue supporting the UF government in order to check the communal forces.

Asserting that the Congress support to the government showed the partys strength, Kesari said that this was because the Congress alone could keep the BJP out of power. Hum terah partiyon ko apne kandhope leke chal rahe hain. Aur wey apne kamjori pe nach rahe hain, he said, meaning that the UF constituents were jubiliant about their weakness at a time when Congress was carrying the 13 UF constituents on its shoulders. The Congress president was also critical of Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda. He said the Prime Minister went to Mumbai to meet Shiv Sena chief at the residence of a film star but later offered another explanation. This, he said, was wrong.

Asserting that the Congress had never aligned with the BJP, Kesari said the UF constituents compromised several times with the communal forces not only in contesting election together but also in the formation of governments both at the Centre as well as in many states.

While Kesari did not touch on the political stalemate in Uttar Pradesh, AICC general secretary B P Maurya expressed the hope that the BSP leader, Mayawati, would become the next Chief Minister of the state.

This, he said, would be in keeping with the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

The Congress president said that his nomination of former finance minister Manmohan Singh to the party working committee was to wage a fight against corruption, unemployment and poverty.

Kesari said his first act after assuming the top party post was to appoint Singh as a CWC member. This, he said, showed his keenness to remove corruption.

Taking a dig at BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Congress president said that when Vajpayee became a minister in the Janata Party government in 1977, he visited the Samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi, but forgot about the Mahatma when he bacame the Prime Minister.

A number of senior Congress leaders including K Karunakaran, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Madhav Singh Solanki, Tariq Anwar, Jagdish Tytler, Meira Kumar, Ved Prakash, Jai Prakash Aggrawal and Sajjan Kumar attended the meeting organised by the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee.