Sonia gets Digvijay to review dismissal of daily-wage staff

Sonia gets Digvijay to review dismissal of daily-wage staff
SANJIV SINHA

NEW DELHI, JULY 4: In an attempt to resolve the ongoing agitation by over 40,000 sacked daily-wage employees in Madhya Pradesh, state Chief Minister Digvijay Singh has now agreed to "review" their dismissal on a case-by-case basis.

This compromise formula was hammered out at a meeting - called at the behest of party chief Sonia Gandhi - between Digvijay Singh and party MLA Kalpana Parulekar (who is leading the charge against the State Government on behalf of the sacked employees) in the presence of AICC general secretary in-charge Prabha Rau here on Monday night.

Party sources said Digvijay has agreed to act as "arbitrator" on the thorny issue which has been plaguing his Government for the past several months and given his detractors, both within his party and in the BJP, enough ammunition to target him. Parulekar, the fiery party MLA who has been spearheading the cause of the sacked daily-wage employees, is reported to have settled for the Chief Minister taking the final decision on the fate of the employees and working out what could be done for them. She is also learnt to have agreed to persuade the employees to withdraw their agitation, after a formal agreement is reached between the Government and the (employees') union. The final date for settlement of cases has been fixed as August 6.

Monday night's meeting, say party sources, is expected to give Digvijay a reprieve from the fiery onslaught which had been launched against him by the agitating employees led by Parulekar, and later joined by BJP stalwart and former Union Minister Uma Bharti.

Parulekar, who was issued a showcause notice by the party high command for unabashedly taking on her own government, later took the employees' case to party chief Sonia Gandhi for arbitration and it was apparently at Sonia's behest that the meeting was set up with Prabha Rau as the moderator.

The issue of the retrenched employees, which has been simmering for the past several months, has got embroiled in the State's politics, with Digvijay's opponents using it to whip up a campaign against him. The Chief Minister till recently had stoutly defended his decision and refused to backtrack, despite the pressure. While things in the State are likely to cool down, Congress leaders from Gujarat, including PCC chief C D Patel and his rival, suspended party MLA Bharat Solanki, met Sonia on Tuesday to narrate their complaints against each other.

Solanki, along with three other senior state leaders, was suspended by the PCC chief for holding a parallel convention in the State recently. Solanki and his father, senior CWC member Madhavsinh Solanki have termed the suspensions as unconstitutional and demanded that they be revoked.

Meanwhile, the Congress has demanded that Union Home Minister L K Advani place a white paper on the ISI in the forthcoming monsoon session of Parliament, if the Government was serious about exposing the danger posed by it. Party spokesperson Anand Sharma told reporters that while the Home Minister has blamed the ISI for the recent attacks on minorities, till now, he has not made its activities public through a white paper he himself had promised.