Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi at the CWC meeting on Monday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Feb. 19: The Congress Working Committee tonight stopped short of demanding the dismissal of the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh.

However, it said that following the Supreme Court verdict disqualifying 13 BSP rebels who voted for the Samajwadi Party in 2003, Mulayam had forfeited the “moral right” to continue as chief minister.

The Congress’s apex decision-making body, which met for over three hours at the residence of Sonia Gandhi this evening, left it to the Centre to decide the next course of action.

However, as the Left parties continued to oppose the use of Article 356 for dismissing the state government, Janardhan Dwivedi, the general secretary who briefed the media, inserted a caveat.

“I have always maintained that this is not a Congress government but a UPA government. If the government has to take a decision (on Uttar Pradesh), it will be done in consultation with our allies.”

Dwivedi said Sonia asked the participants to give their opinion. “Everybody expressed their concern. There was a consensus that the situation was always serious and it became more serious after the Supreme Court’s verdict. In a way, the verdict challenged the very constitution of the state government and said it was illegal,” Dwivedi said.

Asked if the meeting discussed the objections raised by the Left, Dwivedi replied: “All aspects were discussed. But we do not discuss our individual allies or comment on them.”

Sources said a bulk of the time was spent in discussing price rise. Finance minister P. Chidambaram, who is not a CWC member, was invited to what turned into a question-answer session as most members asked why the government was unable to rein in prices.

However, on Uttar Pradesh, it was clear that the Congress had not abandoned its efforts to persuade the Left to toe its line.

This evening, CPI leader A.B. Bardhan met science minister Kapil Sibal who has prepared the legal case for the party and the government. Bardhan said the Left Front was “one in opposing the use of Article 356”.

He was reportedly told of how even UPA constituents such as the DMK, which always spoke out against sacking state governments, “appreciated” the need for central intervention while those like the RJD and Ram Vilas Paswan were supporting the proposed move.

On Saturday, the thrust of Sibal’s argument was that the Mulayam dispensation was “illegal and unconstitutional”, regardless of whether it commanded a majority or not. Today, he went into the nitty-gritty to claim that the next floor test on February 26 would be as “illegal and unconstitutional” as the preceding ones and should, therefore, be disallowed.

He said the chief minister should give the governor as well as the people of the state a list of the number of MLAs who supported his government so that nobody was “left in any doubt” about the “veracity or otherwise” of the trial of strength.

Sibal also contested the Samajwadi Party’s allegation that the Congress wanted to bring the state under central rule and not hold elections for the next six months so that Uttar Pradesh legislators did not get a chance to exercise their franchise in the election to the President’s post in July.

The Samajwadi Party had said it would support Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee for the President’s post.