PATNA, FEB 10: More than 60 Samata Party workers and leaders, including its state vice-president Sanjiv Kumar Toni and general secretary Prem Chandra Mishra, today announced they were going back to the Congress.Toni and Mishra had switched over to the Samata Party with their supporters in protest against the Congress' alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal prior to the last Lok Sabha elections.Talking to newspersons here, the two leaders said the Samata Party had `deviated' from its avowed principles and policies and charged Defence Minister George Fernandes with `saffronising' the party. They alleged that Fernandes, being the national president, was maintaining an `eerie silence' over sensitive issues like the mounting atrocities on Christians and spiralling prices and had reduced the organisation to a `yes party' of the Bharatiya Janata Party.They said the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led coalition government at the Centre and the Samata leadership had ``failed'' to abide by their commitment to dismiss the Rabri Devi Government in the State. The people had high hopes that the BJP-Samata combine would rid the state of the ``misrule'' of the Rashtriya Janata Dal Government and hold fresh elections under President's Rule, they added.The two leaders alleged that the BJP leadership was more interested in the formation of a separate state of Vananchal and the Samata leadership, in the Defence and Railway ministries than the welfare of the State.Toni and Mishra said the Samata leadership had lost its legitimacy. The people resented the hike in prices of essential commodities in the public distribution system, urea and cooking gas, besides the atrocities being perpetrated on the minorities, particularly Christians.They said that the party leadership's attitude towards a special economic package for rest of Bihar in case of the formation of a separate State of Vananchal was ``lackadaisical''.Toni and Mishra released a list of supporters who reportedly severed their association with the Samata Party.
