Congress leaders on Tuesday came down heavily on the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh and claimed that more people had died in the stampede at Ratangarh temple in Datia district than the official figure.
Addressing a Congress rally in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, Congress leader and Union Minister of State for Power Jyotiraditya Scindia said that he visited Ratangarh and found that the number of victims was much more than the figure of 115 quoted by the state government.
"The death toll figure of 115 for the Ratangarh tragedy which the State government is giving is totally fake. I have been to Ratangarh and found that between 300 and 400 people have died there," he claimed.
Scindia, who is also the chairman of Madhya Pradesh Congress poll campaign committee, said the tragedy was not the first of its kind in the state under the BJP rule. "In 2006, a similar incident had taken place in Ratangarh and such tragedies have been witnessed in Sehore, Dewas and Ashoknagar districts," he said.
Senior Congress leader Satyavrat Chaturvedi too claimed that "between 300-400 people had died at Ratangarh." The state government should be pushed out, he said. Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh alleged the stampede had been caused due to corruption in police postings in the state. If a policeman pays money for his posting, he will try to earn back this money from the people, Digvijaya said.
He alleged that in Ratangarh also policemen were charging Rs 200 per tractor for getting it parked in a no-traffic zone and this resulted in traffic jams. On the occasion, Union minister Kamal Nath alleged during the rule of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Madhya Pradesh had been turned into a mafia state. During the 2008 Assembly polls, Chouhan had asked the people to vote for BJP so that he could get five more years to work for development of the state.
The people gave Chouhan these five years but in this period, the condition of the state went from bad to worse, Nath claimed. Leader of Opposition in state Assembly, Ajay Singh said a lot of land had been acquired by the state government from the people for setting up of a solar power plant at Jawad in the region. "It is really sad that till now the state government has not paid any compensation to the people whose land was acquired," Ajay said.
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