Lucknow, Sept 6: The Wikileaks expose on Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati, citing leaked US diplomatic cables, is a “distorted version” of his conversation with a visiting US diplomat, state Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh said on Monday.
Admitting to a conversation with then US Charge d'Affairs Peter Burleigh, Singh denied having said anything against Mayawati, who had detailed him to meet Burleigh.
“The US Charge d'Affairs had sought an appointment with the chief minister sometime in May 2009, but, due to her extremely busy schedule, she entrusted the task of meeting him to me. He had a lot of queries about UP and I was able to share various facts about the state, but the manner in which the whole conversation was being made out in a section of the media, which claimed to have sourced it all to Wikileaks, was absolutely distorted,” Singh said at a press conference here.
He was referring to a report, attributed to Wikileaks, appearing in Monday's Indian Express.
Asked if he had told the US envoy that he saw no possibility of Mayawati emerging as the prime minister in 2009, Singh shot back: “How could I make such predictions?”
He, however, hastened to add that he was asked if she could be the prime minister in the event of formation of a third front government, but clarified that such a possibility was remote as Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was not a part of the third front.
“I further went on to add that it was too early to foresee how the political scenario would shape up in case a third front was actually formed after the election,” he said.
As far as Mayawati's stand on the Indo-US nuclear policy was concerned, the cabinet secretary said: “I told the US envoy that even as the BSP had flatly opposed the Indo-US nuclear deal in the parliament, it was unlikely that it would impact the country's foreign policy, which was determined only by the dispensation sitting in New Delhi and not by a party ruling in a state.”
Meanwhile, addressing a press conference here, BJP spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi termed the Wikileaks expose as an “indicator of the large scale rampant corruption and irregularities in the Mayawati regime”.
