Singh: For quick action

New Delhi, Feb. 12: Senior minister Arjun Singh has asked the Centre to “intervene” following reports that Raj Thackeray’s supporters have been attacking Hindi-speaking people outside Mumbai.

Asked for his comments on the controversy in Maharashtra, the human resource development minister said: “The Centre should intervene.”

The home ministry is assessing the situation and, depending on the outcome, the Centre could despatch additional paramilitary forces.

Singh’s opinion, expressed in public, ran counter to that of home minister Shivraj Patil who said law and order was a state subject and the Centre was, therefore, unwilling to step in.

Congress sources privately felt that the UPA government’s reflexes should have been “quicker”.

A member of the party’s minorities cell said the Maharashtra police’s move to register a first information report against Raj Thackeray and Samajwadi Party MP Abu Asim Azmi was “too little too late”.

The member said the state government appeared to be doing a “balancing act” to show that it was “even-handed” with all groups involved - Marathi speakers as well as people from north India.

“The charges are disproportionate. One actually instigated the violence while the other only spoke in a rally,” he said.

Neither Raj nor Azmi had been arrested till this evening, and “this only shows the police action was a token one”, said a Congress source.

Last week, Sonia Gandhi had summoned Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and asked what the government was doing. After that, there was speculation that Raj would soon be arrested.

The Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra was already facing the charge of “double standards” over the 1993 communal violence. Rights activists and minority leaders were saying that when it came to securing justice for Muslim victims of the post-Babri violence in Mumbai, the government had not shown the “promptness” with which it pursued the blast cases.

Deshmukh has been criticised for the “go-slow” in implementing the Srikrishna riot commission’s recommendations against the police and Shiv Sena activists.

Congress sources admitted that the government, under pressure from the NCP and other regional groups, could do “little”. It feared losing the Marathi voters to the BJP-Sena and the north Indians to the Samajwadi Party.