A day after BSP supremo Mayawati said that she may have to reconsider her party’s outside support to the Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan if cases against innocent persons framed in Bharat Bandh on April 2 were not withdrawn, the Madhya Pradesh government has stated that it will withdraw all the political cases filed by the previous BJP government against workers of political parties and Dalit activists.
This was announced by Law Minister PC Sharma on Tuesday.
“We (Congress) have been fighting (against the BJP government). Irrespective of any party those who have been fighting the BJP government which had sent people to jail… those political cases will be withdrawn,” Sharma said.
Last week, Sharma had indicated that the government was drafting a proposal to withdraw politically motivated cases filed against political and trade union leaders by the previous BJP government.
The Dalit organisations had called a Bharat Bandh on April 2 demanding implementation of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and reservation in promotion for SC/ST government employees.
The BSP has two members in the 230-member Assembly in which the Congress has 114 MLAs and is two short of the majority mark.
In the 200-member Rajasthan Assembly, the Congress has 99 members and its pre-poll ally Rashtriya Lok Dal has one MLA. There are six BSP MLAs and 13 independents.
The Congress had supported the protest in April 2018 against the changes to the SC/ST Act brought in by the Supreme Court which were later nullified by a legislation passed in Parliament.
(With agency inputs)