Email
Print
ShareLucknow: Maverick Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Amar Singh is now cleverly employing journalistic techniques to fight his political battle against arch rival, Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati.
At a press conference on Monday, Amar Singh put his investigative expertise on display with a string of sting operations aimed at "exposing" Mayawati's alleged misdeeds. The SP leader was reacting to a recent FIR lodged against him in connection with a Rs500 crore scam.
"Mayawati is a corporate illiterate... she doesn't even know that the police can do nothing in a case involving Rs 500 crore... she is stupid," he thundered. "She has been after us for a long time... several cases have been lodged against me, Mulayam Singhji and Amitabh Bachchan," he said.
Amar Singh met UP Governor BL Joshi and gave him a memorandum demanding action against Mayawati and her associates, including a senior bureaucrat, who, he said, hatched a conspiracy to defame him by getting the criminal case lodged against him.
Singh also gave the Governor a DVD of the sting operation. The DVD was later played on a projector screen for mediapersons. It showed how funds collected for the BSP were transferred in the name of Mayawati. The show featured telephone conversations and sting interviews of BSP workers and leaders telling how large sums of black money was being laundered by making bank drafts in fictitious names.
A part of the DVD showed Mayawati telling BSP MLAs and MPs to contribute a fixed portion of development funds allotted to them for the party.
The SP leader also displayed video clips from Mayawati's 2007 assembly election campaign, aired on TV channels, where she declares she would send Amar Singh and SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav to jail once her government is formed in the state.
Singh said that Mayawati had got a criminal case registered against him for faulty registration of a commercial vehicle. A sequence in the sting tape shows a police officer saying they were acting on "orders from above". Singh continued: "She even got a criminal case registered against Amitabh Bachchan for grabbing one biswan of land... this is ridiculous."
Referring to the latest FIR against him in Kanpur, he alleged that Mayawati had hatched a conspiracy, with other BSP leaders and a senior IAS officer, to defame him.
He circulated a copy of complainant Shivakant Tripathi's mobile call details to show that these BSP leaders and the officer were in touch with Tripathi long before the FIR lodged on October 15.
