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Raise dam, ensure rehab: Advani
BACKING THE chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat on the Sardar Sarovar Project, L K Advani said today that work on the dam should go on, but at the same time the governments must ensure resettlement of the oustees.
BACKING THE chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat on the Sardar Sarovar Project, L K Advani said today that work on the dam should go on, but at the same time the governments must ensure resettlement of the oustees.
Advani, who was here as part of the Bharat Suraksha Yatra, told reporters that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan had briefed him many times on the steps for rehabilitation and he should expedite the relief process. The orders of the Supreme Court should be followed.
Advani said Narmada was Gujarat’s lifeline and all the parties there were united in their demand for raising the dam height.
The BJP leader refused to comment on the three-member P K Shunglu committee formed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to file a report on the status of rehabilitation.
On the expulsion of Uma Bharti and Madanlal Khurana from the party, he said differences could be tolerated in the party but not indiscipline.
Firing a fresh salvo against the Congress and Sonia Gandhi in connection with the Volcker committee report, Advani demanded that the CBI register cases under Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) against both Natwar Singh and the Congress. After filing the case, the CBI should send letters rogatory, otherwise it would be meaningless, he said.
Advani’s demand comes after Natwar Singh’s interview to a private news channel where he said that he had been made a scapegoat.
Natwar said he was baffled that Congress party was not being mentioned in the whole affair. Advani argued that if Natwar could be questioned by Enforcement Directorate, why should Sonia Gandhi be spared?
Demanding that Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister come clean on the Vollcker controversy, Advani said, “I am dismayed that neither Manmohan Singh nor Sonia Gandhi has so far broken their silence on the Congress party being separately mentioned by the Volcker report as a beneficiary in the scandal.”
Advani asked the Prime Minister to make a statement on the Indo-US nuclear deal after Natwar criticised it in the same interview.
He said that during the two-year rule of the Congress three major scandals had been exposed – the Quattrocchi scandal, Scorpene submarine scam, and the Volcker report on oil-for-food scandal. He said the first two scams are much bigger than Bofors. Quattrocchi scandal has shown the government’s brazen misuse of the investigative agencies and flouting of legal principles to enable Italian fugitive Ottavio Quattrocchi to walk away with Rs 21 crore of Bofors money, and this also exposes Congress leadership’s involvement in the scandal.
Welcoming the restoaration of parliament in Nepal, Advani cautioned against growing influence of the Maoists since they were planning a ‘red corridor’ from Pashupatinath to Tirupati, which would harm India’s security.
Best response in Indore
INDORE HAS by far given the best response to L K Advani’s Bharat Suraksha Yatra, thus far. Advani himself admitted this, not only in his brief address to party workers before he left for Mandsaur this morning, but also to the media.
He said, “I was overwhelmed by the response”, and went on to add that this was not something he was saying just out of courtesy - he really meant it.
In fact, Advani gave an indication that he was pleased by the reception last night in the public meeting itself when he said, “When I saw so many people on the roads waiting to greet me, I thought that the meeting venue might be empty, but it appears that the whole of Indore has come out.”
Though the entire BJP leadership pulled its weight to make the public meeting a success, the Vijayvargiya-Mendola combine did most of the work, since the entire stretch of the journey from LIG Crossing to the venue at DRP Lines falls under Assembly Segment No 2, represented by Vijayvargiya.
Break in Yatra
SENIOR BJP leader L K ADVANI is taking a two-day break from his Bharat Suraksha Yatra to campaign in Coimbatore and other places in Tamil Nadu, where Assembly elections are scheduled.
Advani, who was supposed to cover Ujjain, Mandsaur and Neemuch in these two days and enter Rajasthan, would now temporarily halt the yatra at Mandsaur this evening. He will resume the yatra on May 1 at Neemuch, from where he will enter Rajasthan.
