Chandigarh:
The war of words between Mayawati and Rahul Gandhi continues. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister today hit out at the Congress General Secretary for fuelling farmers' protests on the issue of land acquisition and said her political opponents were hatching a conspiracy to weaken her party.
Addressing a rally in Chandigarh, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo said, "The Congress was only responsible for the demonstrations by the peasantry," she said referring to the recent farmers' agitation in Bhatta and Parsaul villages in Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh.
Mayawati also advocated a uniform land acquisition policy for the entire country. "We will raise the issue in Parliament for bringing uniform land acquisition policy," the UP chief minister said at the North Zone convention of the party.
She also accused her political opponents of hatching conspiracies to weaken the BSP and asserted that the party would not bow down to any such tactics.
"After BSP came to power in Uttar Pradesh, the opposition parties with caste-based mindset tried to inflate minor incidents to make the party unstable," she said.
Rahul Gandhi was arrested on the night of May 11 by the UP police after he had slipped unnoticed in pre-dawn hours to the affected area in support of the farmers agitating against the state's land acquisition process for an expressway project.
Gandhi, who had spent nearly 19 hours at Bhatta-Parsaul, the epicentre of the farmers' agitation, was arrested and released later.
Taking the land acquisition issue in UP to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's door, Gandhi had on May 16 complained to him about alleged "rape" of women and "murder" of farmers there, a charge denied by the Mayawati government.
Reviving the Bhatta-Parsaul farmers' issue, Congress leader Sachin Pilot had on May 22 visited protestors lodged in Dasna Jail and was arrested on way to the violence-hit areas in Greater Noida to meet families of those injured during the agitation over land acquisition. Four persons, including two policemen, were killed on May 7 during the Bhatta-Parsaul agitation.