People will unseat Mayawati soon: Sibal

Lucknow, (IANS) - Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati's "days in power are now numbered as the people of the state are going to unseat her soon", Human Resource Development Minster Kapil Sibal Sunday said.

Chairing a seminar organised by the Congress' state unit on "Issues relating to Governance in Uttar Pradesh", Sibal compared the relationship between the ruled and the ruler to a horse and its rider, saying "It is now amply evident that the horse is not going to tolerate the rider for long."

Expressing hope of return of Congress to power in the state soon, Sibal declared: "And let me tell you that this state is soon going to witness return of Ram-Rajya."

He flayed Mayawati for finding lame excuses for not implementing the right to education act in the state.

"While the Mayawati government has been pleading that it was short of funds, the state government is going about indulging in avoidable wasteful expenditure", he commented in reference to the thousands of crores Mayawati had devoted to raising of memorials and erection of her own statues  in addition to that of her party's icons.

Lamenting over the backwardness of state, he said it was lagging far behind other states on various counts and the best way to take it ahead would be by propagating higher education.

In his remarks, Congress general secretary and state in-charge Digvijay Singh blamed the state's poor conditions on the successive non-Congress governments since the ouster of the Congress in 1989.

"It was UP's misfortune that such people have been ruling the state whose pictures used to be displayed in police stations until the end of the 1980s," he said.

State Congress chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi cited the 2009-10  report of the National Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Commission, which expressed deep displeasure over the current condition of Dalits in the state.

"It is really lamentable that a government which claims to be championing the cause of the downtrodden had failed to improve the lot of Dalits in the state," she said.

Held as a part of the Congress party's 125th anniversary celebrations, the seminar was also addressed by senior Congress leader Pramod Tiwari and a couple of retired Indian Administrative Service officers.