Airport, reforms: Maya sells UP as investment hub

With industry heavyweights competing to compliment Mayawati’s ‘‘decisive initiatives’’ to pull Uttar Pradesh out of...

With industry heavyweights competing to compliment Mayawati’s ‘‘decisive initiatives’’ to pull Uttar Pradesh out of the morass, the Chief Minister was yesterday upbeat, discounting reports of her differences with the BJP as ‘‘false and concocted’’.

‘‘My government is stable and I am getting 100 per cent cooperation from BJP. The reports of my differences with the BJP leadership are creations of the media,’’ Mayawati said.

At her high-profile dinner interaction with business bigwigs — where she announced the plan to set up a Rs 1,200-crore international airport in Khushinagar near Delhi — none of the top BJP leaders was visible.

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Only an ailing BSP chief Kanshi Ram was found sitting quietly away from the arclights, watching Mayawati pick up kudos from the industry as she promised them time-bound labour reforms, swift progress on the Taj Economic Zone project, an investor-friendly climate and more.

Mayawati did not lose sight of her vote-bank even as she wooed the industry and investors from the Tata Group, Videocon, NIIT, SBI and Chambers of Commerce to plough in funds to ‘‘the huge UP market’’.

The proposed airport, which the Netherlands-based credit rating agency Ramboll and Crisil has said can become an international aviation hub with aircraft maintenance facilities, will be called Gautam Budh international airport.

And as Mayawati rechristened herself an ‘‘industry-friendly CM’’ from one who (in her earlier incarnations) was more fond of renaming parks and auditoria after B.R. Ambedkar and Gautam Budh, she declared: ‘‘I have never said the BJP had no choice, but to join hands with the BSP for political compulsion. There are no differences.’’

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