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Karan Singh not to contest

Congress leader and former Union minister Karan Singh today said he had no plan to contest the coming Lok Sabha election.

The former Sadr-e-Riyasat of Jammu and Kashmir, who re-joined the Congress early this month, told reporters in Amritsar that he will tour the country in the next few days to boost his party's chances.

Singh started his campaign trail by addressing a meeting in favour of party candidate and former Union minister R L Bhatia.

Singh said he would stress on "stability, national security and all-round development" during his campaign. Multiple coalition experiments that the country had seen in the last couple of years had failed to provide stability at the Centre, he said, claiming only the Congress could provide it.

National security is directly related to stability and the Kargil issue clearly proved that a coalition government cannot be entrusted with the task of building a secure and strong India, he said.

If there was no intelligence failure in Kargil, as Vajpayee claimed, then there must have been a political failure, he said. While acknowledging Vajpayee's leadership qualities, Singh said that in a democratic set-up the cabinet had a very important role.

He said the contradictory statements of Defence Minister George Fernandes from time to time showed the degree of responsibility of coalition governments, he said.

Asked about the matter of Congress President Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin, Singh said that while making it a campaign issue, the BJP and its coalition partners had forgotten that a "bahu" becomes a part of her in-law's house after marriage.

"This issue is nothing but inverted racism", he said. Referring to Information and Broadcasting Minister Promod Mahajan's statement equating Sonia Gandhi with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Singh said it was the most disgraceful remark for a minister to make.

Refusing to commit on whether the Congress would form the next government at the Centre, he opined that his party would do much better than the last Lok Sabha polls. "I do not believe in poll surveys because they have gone wrong in the past," he said to a question.

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