The development came hours after BJP’s national president Amit Shah reached Lucknow on a three-day visit, fuelling speculations that the three may soon join BJP and some others may follow suit in the near future.
Both SP and BSP were caught unawares with the resignations, prompting their senior leaders to go into a huddle as the news trickled in.
There were reports that senior leaders tried to contact their respective Mlcs — Bukkal Nawab and Yashwant Singh from SP and Thakur Jaiveer Singh from BSP — but in vain.
Speculations about the three MLCs drifting towards BJP didn’t seem to be unfounded. Nawab was all praises for PM Narendra Modi and UP CM Aditya Nath Yogi as he went to meet the vidhan parishad chairman to put in his papers.
“PM Narendra Modi believes in ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas’ and BJP is doing a good job in UP as well under CM Yogi,” he said, but remained non-committal on joining BJP. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and BSP supremo Mayawati squarely blamed BJP for “poaching” the MLCs.
Akhilesh alleged that the resignations were engineered by BJP so that those vacancies in the vidhan parishad could be filled by Yogi and four of ministers without contesting elections.
Yogi, his deputies Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, and ministers Swatantra Deo Singh and Mohsin Raza have to become members of either of the two Houses before the six-month deadline ends on September 18. However, senior minister Sidharth Nath Singh said it was for SP and BSP to explain why their leaders were resigning.
“It is for the SP leadership to ponder upon the reasons which have prompted their MLCs to resign,” he said when asked about SP MLCs’ resignations.
While Nawab has been a loyalist of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh, Yashwant Singh is considered close to independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya, who recently sided with NDA by voting for R N Kovind in the presidential poll.
Source : timesofindia
