'Apologise, admit mistake,' Assange hits back after Mayawati’s asylum offer

Earlier in the day, reacting to the damning US diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks recently, Mayawati had said that the ``owner of WikiLeaks needs to be in a mental asylum’’. Calling the content of the cables “mischievous, baseless, wrong and shameless”, she had offered to find a place for Assange in the mental asylum near Agra if his government failed to do so. The cables call her “a first-rate egomaniac” who wants to be the Prime Minister of India and a virtually ``paranoid dictator’’ among other unflattering things. They also say that she once a sent a private jet to Mumbai for a pair of shoes and that she had institutionalised corruption in the state. [caption id=“attachment_77733” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters”]  [/caption] Mayawati, without naming Assange, said he was either working with her political opponents or had “gone mad”. On the shoes issue, which has generated a lot of curiosity, she said, “As far as I am concerned, I do not know of any such thing. But if WikiLeaks and BJP leaders are making such a wild claim, then I would like to ask them, if they also flew down in that plane to get me those special sandals?” She said the WikiLeaks was “playing into the hands of opposition parties”. Replying to her, Assange said, “Mayawati has betrayed rational thought. The question is, has she also betrayed the Dalits? There is no question that the documents are official papers from the US embassy. These papers have been proven the world over, including by the aggressive persecution of our people by Washington. The allegations within them are made by US diplomats in their private communications back to Hillary Clinton. If Chief Minister Mayawati has a problem with the contents of these communications she need to take it up with Hillary.” Assange asked Mayawati to admit her error and apologise. “Should she fail to do so, she is welcome to send her private jet to England to collect me, where I have been detained against my will, under house arrest, for the last 272 days. I would be happy to accept asylum, political asylum, in India–a nation I love. In return, I will bring Mayawati a range of the finest British footwear.” Senior BSP leader Satish Chandra Mishra termed the WikiLeaks report about Mayawati as “baseless and wrong” and said there was a conspiracy against the party ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls. “This is an absolute lie and is totally baseless. Whosoever has published this, should have verified and then gone ahead with this news,” he told reporters in New Delhi. He said newspapers should have considered this before publishing the contents of the cables. “That is why we have decided that we will take legal action against the newspapers and TV channels who have shown it and the people behind this will soon be exposed,” he added.