Cong. to go it alone in local body polls

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, AUG. 18. The Congress intends to contest the local bodies elections in Maharashtra on its own. According to the State PCC president, Mr. Govindrao Adik, the aim was to keep the party in readiness for the Lok Sabha polls. ``This will be a dress rehearsal for the Parliament elections which can be held anytime,'' Mr. Adik told newspersons this afternoon.

According to the Maharashtra PCC chief, the main aim of the party was to ``form a Government in the State on our own strengths after the next elections''. This, he said, was necessary in order to take `pro-poor' and `pro-people' decisions. Mr. Adik said his party planned to undertake a massive mass contact program - ``sidhata abhiyan'' - which will be flagged off by the Congress president, Ms. Sonia Gandhi, on August 24 in Pune. She will also inaugurate the Pune festival the same day.

Mr. Adik said that the Congress was not used to running coalition Governments and it was not its policy to depend on coalitions. The party had agreed to a coalition in Maharashtra because ``just to keep power away from communal combination''. Complimenting the Maharashtra Chief Minister, Mr. Vilasrao Deshmukh, for skillfully running the coalition Government, Mr. Adik said his task was being made difficult by the pulls and counter-pulls inherent in coalition Government politics.

Mr. Adik said that the aim of the ``sidhata abhiyan'' was to build up the party's base as well as streamline the organizational set-up of the party. He also used the occasion to take potshots at the NCP chief, Mr. Sharad Pawar. ``Some power- hungry people, who have always played the politics of treachery, tried to weaken the Maharashtra Congress with their usual tactics. They tried to create the illusion that the Congress party was on its way out.''

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