Jharkhand CM meets allies; UPA to take to streets on November 5

RANCHI: Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) politicians threatened on Wednesday to block the movement of coal and other minerals from the state, like the economic blockade for their statehood movement, to protest an alleged ploy by the Centre to destabilise the state government.
CM Hemant Soren convened a high-level meeting of UPA constituents in the evening at his residence to brainstorm ways to handle the fresh crisis. The UPA has decided to take to the streets on November 5 to protest against the federal agencies, accusing them of acting as agents of the BJP-led government at the Centre to target non-BJP states.
Soren said later on Wed- nesday that the ED had summoned him for questioning based on a request from “his friends in the opposition” in their desperate attempt to malign his image before the people of the state. “If they think they will be able to malign my image by falsely implicating me, they are mistaken. They will get an appropriate reply to this very soon. I am not afraid,” he added.
JMM also blamed governor Ramesh Bais for sitting on the election commission’s recommendation in the office-of-profit case against Soren as part of a larger conspiracy to destabilise a democratically elected government.
“The governor must come clean on what he meant by the words ‘atom bomb’. The larger conspiracy is out in the open now. False propaganda is being done to defame the CM,” JMM general secretary Supriyo Bhattacharya claimed. He said JMM will launch protests against the Modi-governmentand the party was preparing itself for a long-drawn political battle that would stretch from “sadan to sadak (Vidhan Sabha to the streets)”.