Former Union Minister and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) President Ajit Singh on Tuesday announced that he is retiring from electoral politics and will not contest any Lok Sabha election in future.
Addressing the media in his one-time parliamentary constituency, Ajit Singh -- son of late Prime Minister Chowdhary Charan Singh -- also signalled that his lone mission would now be to dislodge the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power for which he would align with a front being attempted by the opposition parties.
Pushed to the sidelines of politics after his party won no seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and fared badly in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Ajit Singh said his party would be an integral part of the grand alliance being tailored by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and ruled out any truck in future with the BJP.
The victory of the RLD candidate in the Kairana Lok Sabha by-election, where Tabassum Hasan was supported by a united opposition, showed the way to defeat the BJP, he said.
He said that rather than the BJP, its parent organisation Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) was calling the shots.
Ajit Singh termed the Rs 7,000 crore sugarcane package to the sugarcane growers a "fraud perpetrated on them" as this would not benefit them a wee bit.
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"BJP and Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi are good at making false promises whereas in reality they just preach hatred," the several-time Union Minister said and claimed that the country was being swept by a "massive anti-Modi wave".
He predicted a washout of the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Asked if he would now project his son Jayant Chowdhary as the next leader of the party, he quipped that he was hanging the boots from electoral politics as he was 80 years old now and that his son was learning the grind in his own way.
Only the future would say how much space he can get for himself in politics.
Ajit Singh started his parliamentary career by getting elected to the Lok Sabha from Baghpat in 1989 and then successfully won the seat in 1991, 1996, 1999, 2004 and 2009.
He was defeated by former Mumbai Police Commissioner Satpal Singh in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from the same constituency.
--IANS
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