The Rashtriya Lok Dal on Tuesday set aside speculations on a fissure with alliance partner Samajwadi Party following the absence of their MLAs from the SP’s mock assembly proceedings outside Vidhan Bhawan in protest of price rise and other public issues in UP on Monday.
National convenor of Team RLD Anupam Mishra said, “It was BJP’s ploy to spread rumours of cracks between the two parties. We both protested against the government on the first day of the Monsoon Session. Our program was fixed earlier than SP’s and our MLAs could not take part in the SP protest,” he said.
Mishra said RLD MLAs staged a protest at the farmers’ messiah statue at Vidhan Bhawan. “We protested against the UP government’s anti-public, anti-farmer, anti-labourer policies and other issues. In democracy, sometimes the political parties in opposition stage protest against the government in a way that is decided by their respective chiefs and this should not be seen as a mark of rift between them because they all are on the same page when it comes to highlighting people’s issues,” he said.
RLD national spokesman, Anil Dubey termed the reports of differences between RLD and SP as rumours and said, “We protested against the BJP government for its anti-public and anti-farmers policies. The mock assembly was SP’s plan and it was successful. It doesn’t mean that we (RLD and SP) have developed differences. We are on the same page when it comes to staging protests against the BJP on people’s issues,” he added.
However, the speculations refused to die down despite RLD leaders’ rebuttal. Sources said the speculations started doing the rounds after a party leader gave a statement in western UP that the RLD would go it alone in the local body elections.
“The statement by the leader was seen as RLD distancing itself from the alliance to score maximum mileage in elections in the western UP districts where the party feels that its position is stronger. Also, the party did not want any backlash among local-level leaders who had staged protests when the ticket distribution for the recent UP assembly elections was underway,” one source said.
The sources said that the SP’s protest plan was a closely-guarded secret and the RLD leaders came to know about it only when the SP chief organised the mock proceedings. “We were not asked to take part in the protest or seven out of eight RLD MLAs would also have been there,” an RLD leader said.