RSS remote-controlling Modi government: Mayawati

Lucknow: The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) was remote-controlling the Narendra Modi government, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati has said.

The fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to an RSS meeting and attended its deliberations did not augur well for Indian democracy, she said in a statement issued late on Sunday.

"These developments prove that our apprehensions about the control of RSS headquarters at Nagpur over the union government were true," the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister said.

She also took on the RSS for patting the Modi government and asked if the Sangh did not see any failures of the central government on issues like price rise, poverty and unemployment.

The BSP leader accused the Modi government of U-turn on its own stand, pointing out how the Bharatiya Janata Party over the years had accused the then Manmohan Singh-led UPA government of being remote-controlled by 10 Janpath, the residence of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Mayawati also took on the prime minister for calling Bodh Gaya the 'spiritual capital' of the world and said that offering mere lip service on the issue would not suffice.

She said that Modi should instead work on developing the Buddhist centre in Bihar as an international tourist spot.

BJP state spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak, however, ridiculed Mayawati's statement and said that the Dalit leader was "desperate" and was doing all this to "find political space in the polity".

"Behen-ji has lost face after defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and her captive vote bank has broken ranks with her. Now, she is left with nothing but to make wild, unsubstantiated charges," he told IANS.

He said that in a democracy the governments were "answerable to nationalistic forces" and the party saw nothing wrong in union ministers' presence at the RSS meet.