Deepak Gidwani

Lucknow: The Mayawati government has been hit by a Madhumita redux. In her last tenure as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Maya was forced to drop tainted minister Amarmani Tripathi in May 2003 after recommending a CBI inquiry into the murder of his lady love Madhumita Shukla. Amarmani and his wife have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the latest episode, minister of state for food processing Anand Sen Yadav has been dropped in an alarmingly similar case.Maya has also recommended a CBI probe into the death of 24-year-old Dalit girl Shashi Passi, a law student from Faizabad, who was allegedly having an affair with the minister.

Shashi’s father Yogendra Prasad told reporters here on Tuesday police were not taking action in the case as the minister was directly involved.

Interestingly, Yogendra himself is closely associated with the BSP and has been a state president of BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation), founded by former BSP president the late Kanshi Ram.

Prasad alleged Shashi had been kidnapped and suspected the involvement of the minister.

“I suspect the involvement of the minister, his driver and a woman in this. I have filed a complaint but no one is taking action. I am afraid she might have been killed by now,” he said.

The issue rocked the state assembly on Tuesday where leader of the opposition and former chief minister Mulayam Singh alleged the girl was pregnant and demanded a highlevel inquiry. Mulayam lambasted the state government for alleged “inertia” in the matter.

Anand Sen termed the allegations baseless and said it was part of a conspiracy by the Samajwadi Party to defame him and the BSP government. Anand Sen has 11 criminal cases pending against him. He was in jail the day he was to be sworn in as minister.

The police have recovered the love letters Shashi had written to the minister and arrested his driver Vijay after the girl’s father named him and another woman, Seema Azad, in his complaint lodged at Ayodhya Police Station on October 23, the day after Shashi went missing.

Cabinet secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh told reporters the driver told the police that Shashi committed suicide by jumping into the Gomti in Sultanpur district. Her body, however, is still to be recovered.

“So far there is nothing to prove that the minister is involved in this case. Even then, he has resigned on moral grounds,” Singh said, adding that the minister had, in fact, helped the family after Shashi went missing.

Police sources, on the other hand, claimed Vijay has confessed to kidnapping the girl and told the police that she was pregnant at the time of her death. He also said she was murdered the same day she was abducted from Ayodhya on October 22. He said she was killed because she was pressuring the minister for marriage.

Source : DNA