Uttar Pradesh Congress president and MLA Ajay Kumar Lallu and former legislator Vivek Bansal have been arrested by the Agra police for protesting against administration’s refusal to allow buses buses to ply into Uttar Pradesh from Rajasthan.
The two leaders, along with four or five unidentified Congress workers, were booked under Sections 188 and 269 of the IPC and Sections 3 and 4 of the Epidemic Diseases Act at the Fatehpur Sikri police station. They were detained on Tuesday evening while protesting at the Bharatpur border of U.P. and Rajasthan after the Agra administration did not allow the buses arranged by the Congress to go to Noida and Ghaziabad for transporting stranded migrant workers home.
In the FIR, the police charged the Congress leaders with unlawful assembly and alleged that during the protest they raised slogans and some among them did not wear masks or maintain proper distance.
‘A political stunt’
Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma accused the Congress of indulging in a political stunt and claimed that it was found that around 460 vehicles submitted in the list by the Congress were bogus.
Out of the 1,000 buses, 297 did not have the fitness certificate, 98 were three-wheelers, cars and ambulances, while 68 vehicles did not have proper papers, he said. “Should we play with the lives of migrants workers by running unfit buses,” he asked. He also questioned how a political party like the Congress was able to assemble buses of the Rajasthan State Roadways for private use.
Rohit Chaudhary, national secretary, AICC, said 1,000 buses of the Congress were still standing outside Agra. At a daily charge of ₹1.60 crore for the buses a day, Mr. Chaudhary said, the party had so far spent ₹4.80 crore in three says for renting the buses but they were still not put to use by the U.P. government. “And due to you [Adityanath], not a single migrant worker has reached home”, he alleged.
