NEW DELHI: A day after the CBI asked Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati to join probe into the Rs 10,000-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam in Uttar Pradesh, she alleged on Tuesday that the decision to question her, four years after the issue came to light, only “reeks of political vendetta.” The scam took place during Mayawati’s regime between 2007 and 2012.
Accusing the Centre of misusing” the CBI, Mayawati claimed she had no links to the scam. “The CBI is free to investigate me,” she said. The Centre rejected Mayawati’s allegation. “The CBI does its work on the basis of proof. There is no need to draw any other conclusion,” Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad clarified.
Mayawati, however, went hammer and tongs at the government. “It is an attempt to demoralise me and my party workers ahead of the Bihar Assembly elections,” she alleged and asserted, “I have no connection with the NRHM scam. I warn the BJP to give up such deeds. Congress had also tried such tricks to divert attention from its failures of governance. I do not succumb to pressure, I do not bend.”