UP welcomes Vajpayee with a Rs 2-cr splurge

Today, as in the past two days, all local newspapers carried advertisements of roughly Rs 5 lakh each. Usually such advertisements are issued by the Information Directorate. This time, however, different state government departments, including Health, Irrigation and Urban Development, issued advertisements separately. A senior official attributed this to the ministers’ game of one-upmanship. “Officials do not come into the picture,” he said.

Vajpayee had told reporters last evening that he had come to “mourn and not to celebrate” but there are few takers for this clarification. For the first time, the Prime Minister’s visit to his constituency has evoked sharp reactions from not only political leaders, cutting across political lines, but also from the common man. Former Prime Ministers Chandra Shekhar and Deve Gowda said in this difficult hour the Gujaratis needed the PM more than the people of his constituency. Instead of coming to the city to inauguratedevelopment schemes, he should have remained in Delhi to monitor the relief and rescue work in Gujarat where thousands of people were still missing, the leaders said.

Samajwadi Party state president Ram Sharan Das and Congress LegislatureParty leader Pramod Tiwari said the Vajpayee Government wanted to mop upadditional revenue not for spending on relief work but luxuries.“How can the Prime Minister justify an expenditure of about Rs 2 crore by the state government at a time when food riots have broken out in the Kutch region of Gujarat after the quake,” they said.