Mayawati offers to take up speaker's issue with BSP chief

Striking a reconciliatory note, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Wednesday offered to use her good offices with Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Kanshi Ram for finding a ''way out'' of the current deadlock over the assembly speaker issue. However, she wanted Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kalyan Singh to guarantee that the speaker would not be used to engineer defections.

Addressing the media, she said, ''We are not at all worried about the BSP legislators but the BJP leadership must assure us that there will be no defections from any other party like the Congress as well.

''We want Kalyan Singh to run his government for the next six months depending on his coalition partner -- the BSP -- as I have been doing during my tenure,'' she added.

Besides, the chief minister wanted all the welfare programmes for dalits and the poor to be continued.

"The BJP should also assure us that life and property of the Muslims would remain safe and their religious places protected," Mayawati added.

Mayawati also recalled Kalyan Singh's ''conduct' in the pre-March 1997 period, when he kept assuring the BJP leadership for over two months that he would be able to muster the majority required for forming the government in the state.

''But for this, the BJP-BSP alliance would have been forged much earlier,'' she added. ''Kalyan Singh did not co-operate with us at the desired level. He also created difficulties for us by issuing statements against the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act.''

''These were the factors which provoked BSP chief Kanshi Ram to raise the speaker's issue.'' However, the chief minister said the BSP had ''full faith in the BJP leadership which must have realised our difficulties.''

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