LUCKNOW - Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Thursday denied her government had defied the Supreme Court order on halting all construction activity in the state.

Addressing a rally during a foundation stone laying ceremony for a 70-acre eco garden named after the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram here in the evening, the chief minister trained her guns on the opposition and the media for what she termed as “distortion and twisting of facts”.

She said: “We never violated the Supreme Court’s order to stop work at various memorial construction sites; it was the opposition parties and a section of the media that painted a false picture.

“We have clarified our position in an affidavit submitted before the apex court today,” she added.

The Supreme Court had last week given a six-hour ultimatum to the state government for bringing construction activity at different memorial sites in Lucknow to a halt.

While complying with the apex court’s ultimatum, Mayawati however continued with the demolition. She got the Lucknow district jail building pulled down, debris removed and ground levelled to pave way for laying a grand Kanshi Ram Eco Garden - all in less than 72 hours.

Mayawati claimed that she had conceived the eco park concept a long time ago.

“Since the local jail had to be moved to a new and modern building as the old building was not only crumbling but was also over-crowded, the huge chunk of jail land came in handy for the eco park, for which we had been hunting for an appropriate locale for quite sometime,” she said.

Coincidentally the eco park would adjoin the Rs.725 crore Kanshi Ram Memorial built on a 25-acre plot of land, which was earlier carved out of the jail compound.

She said the proposed eco garden to be “world class” and “people will come down to see the garden not only from different corners of India but also from foreign lands”.

Mayawati blamed the Samajwadi Party and the Congress for “getting frivolous PILs filed” against construction projects undertaken by her.

Reacting to Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s threat to get her statues demolished once he returns to power, Mayawati warned, “if Mulayam ever dares to do that it will lead to country-wide protests and such breakdown of law and order that the whole nation may have to be put under President’s rule.”

Defending her memorial and statue (including her own) building spree, she attacked the Congress for pushing the proposed multi-billion crore giant statue of Shivaji in the sea across Marine drive in Mumbai. “Rarely has the Congress cared to name anything after anyone other than members of the Nehru-Gandhi family; even personalities like Rajendra Prasad, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and other prominent figures have been systematically ignored,” she pointed out.

Terming both Congress and the Samajwadi Party as “anti-Dalit”, she observed, “by opposing my bid to raise memorials in the name of social reformers who championed the cause of Dalits, the two parties have shown their casteist approach.”

She sought to justify the construction of a giant memorial in Noida with statues of all Dalit icons including herself, by claiming, “it was being done on popular demand of Dalits living in and around Delhi for whom it was not possible to come all the way to Lucknow to see the grand memorials I have built here.”

Mayawati also criticised Congress president Sonia Gandhi as well as her son Rahul Gandhi by terming their recent gesture to travel economy class as “melodrama”.