UP speaker rejects CM's request to cancel foreign trip

Uttar Pradesh assembly Speaker Kesri Nath Tripathi on Tuesday turned down Chief Minister Mayawati's request that he cancel his 18-day foreign visit to Mauritius beginning September 16.

''I have made it clear that the cancellation of my visit does not arise,'' Tripathi said, soon after visiting the chief minister at her home. Tripathi is scheduled to attend a meeting of speakers of Commonwealth countries in Mauritius.

The chief minister had asked him to stay back in Lucknow since power is to be transferred to a Bharatiya Janata Party government on September 21. Her Bahujan Samaj Party had demanded that the speaker be changed as a condition for transferring power. But Tripathi felt his presence was not important during the transfer of power as he neither had to take oath nor administer the oath to members. Asked whether Mayawati was authorised to cancel his visit, he said, "The chief minister had no powers to cancel the speaker's decision.''

''I have told Mayawati that I am not going to resign," Tripathi said, since none of his party leaders, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Murli Manohar Joshi and Pramod Mahajan, had told him to take the step.

Tripathi had dissolved the panel of presiding officers, claiming that some of them could find a place in the state cabinet after power was transferred to the BJP. In that case the panel had to be reconstituted, he said.

If the assembly had to be convened, he said the House could elect a presiding officer, but he pointed out that it would amount to a violation of parliamentary practices.

Meanwhile, BJP vice-president Bangaru Lakshman said the BSP would be "the worst sufferer" if the present coalition cracked up over the issue of changing the speaker. He maintained that swapping the posts of speaker and chief minister was not part of the original deal and that Mayawati's replacement by Kalyan Singh had "no relationship with the change of the speaker".

"It is all in black and white. And there is no such thing as simultaneous change of speaker and chief minister," he said. However, since the issue had cropped up now, he hoped it would be amicably settled by September 15.

Lakshman hoped that Mayawati, despite her repeated insistence on the chief minister-speaker swap, would appreciate the ground realities in Uttar Pradesh and not allow the BSP-BJP coalition to snap. "If such an eventuality does come about, the BSP will be the worst sufferer... because of the peculiar conditions in UP," he said.

Allaying fears that the BJP speaker would engineer defections after the transfer of power, Lakshman said, "We want to assure the BSP that we (the BJP) will not allow any defection during Kalyan Singh's tenure as chief minister".

Asked whether Mayawati's insistence on a simultaneous change of speaker could lead to the break-up of the alliance, Lakshman shot back, ''Do not go by what she has been saying so far. 'The six-month experience (as chief minister) has taught Mayawati that it is in her interest that the coalition does not break in UP...," the BJP leader said, adding that the BSP stood to lose a lot in UP if the alliance cracked up.

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