The newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is yet to formally resign his Lok Sabha membership. But on Tuesday he delivered what amounted to a farewell speech to the House. Speaking on the Finance Bill, Mr. Adityanath heaped encomiums on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s model of development and vowed to create a “new structure of progress” in Uttar Pradesh, taking all sections of the society with him.
“ Uttar Pradesh brashtachar mukt, danga mukt hoga (U.P. will be free of corruption and riots),” he said, vehemently countering apprehensions about his Hindutva image. “I have been a member of this House for over two decades and have raised the issue of Japanese Encephalitis that particularly afflicts the poor and marginal communities in Gorakhpur, my Lok Sabha seat. There were members here who belonged to parties that were running the government in U.P. then, who gave grand statements about the poor and including them in the growth story, but never did anything for these people,” he said in a taunt directed at the SP and the BSP. “When I first became a member of the Lok Sabha in 1996, I went to meet the then Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers Surjit Singh Barnala, who repeatedly asked me whether I was from Gorakhpur. When I asked him why was he asking, he looked at my [then] thin figure and said he had only been to the area once for a public meeting and had to flee because of bombs going off.
“It pained me to hear that account of my constituency. When I went back, I called all the prominent traders and influential people and said we must improve our image, this cannot be us. After that, there has been no riots or killing of a trader in Gorakhpur. In Uttar Pradesh last year, under the SP government, there were 403 small riots, but not a single one of them in Gorakhpur,” he said, apparently to drive home the point that he considered apprehensions that his chief ministership would lead to communal tensions unfounded.
Slams ‘U.P. ke ladke’
Taking a dig at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and former U.P. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav who campaigned as “U.P. ke ladke” or the “boys from U.P.”, Mr. Adityanath said that he was a year younger than Mr. Gandhi and a year older than Mr. Yadav. “Perhaps, that is why I came between them, and you [pointing to senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge] lost the plot,” he said with a smile.
