Amit Shah was addressing a rally in Saharanpur. (FILE)
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday accused the previous state governments of conspiring to sell off cooperative sugar mills and targeted them for filing "one-sided cases" during riots, alluding also to the “exodus” of Hindus from another western UP town some years back.
With the next assembly elections just months away, the BJP leader praised the Yogi Adityanath government, saying it has ensured the rapid clearing of the backlog of payments to sugarcane farmers.
Apart from Punjab and Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh -- on which Mr Shah is focusing his campaign -- contributed the most to the protest over the recently repealed farm laws. Bhartiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait hails from this region.
Mr Shah was addressing a rally in Saharanpur after laying the foundation stone for the Maa Shakumbhari Devi University.
He also referred to the ongoing construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the enactment of a law against instant triple talaq and the abrogation of special status under Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir, giving the credit for them to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He hit out at Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav over law and order, comparing crime statistics during his term as chief minister with those under Adityanath's BJP government.
“From which spectacles does Akhilesh ji see,” he asked, and also claimed there was a “mafia raj” under Yadav and criminals “felicitated”.
Without naming Shamli's Kairana town or elaborating on the details, the home minister said when he came to Saharanpur itself ahead of the 2017 polls, people asked him what the party intended to do about “palayan” (exodus, migration).
“I told them that people who are making them flee will themselves flee from Uttar Pradesh if a Bharatiya Janata Party government comes to power,” Mr Shah said.
In the run-up to the last assembly elections, the BJP had claimed that several Hindu families left Kairana after facing threats from criminals -- an allegation contested by others.
Yogi Adityanath had also invoked the alleged exodus during his recent visit to that town recently.
"There was a time when riots used to happen here, youths were killed and there used to be curfew for days. There was a tendency to file one-sided cases. Now, due to the BJP government, there are no riots,” Mr Shah said.
He claimed that women were vulnerable during the previous government's term.
“Our daughters had to be sent to other states for education because they did not have security here. Today, in western Uttar Pradesh the situation has changed and migration has stopped," he said.
Mr Shah claimed police in UP were scared of criminals earlier, but now the criminals are surrendering due to the fear of police. Government property has been freed from the mafia.
“Cow slaughter was stopped and illegal slaughter houses closed," he said.
Focusing on sugarcane farmers, he said not a single mill has been sold off during the Mr Adityanath term and “90 per cent” of the dues of farmers who sell their crop to them have already been cleared.
He alleged that during the term of the earlier governments, there was a conspiracy to sell the mills to favoured people, and the CBI is probing into the matter.
The BJP won 60 of the 80 assembly seats in western UP in 2017.
Mr Shah urged people at the rally to help the party cross the 300-seat tally in the state where polling will be held for 403 seats in the coming elections.
He said Narendra Modi government has dealt with several issues, which others government at the Centre had not dared to tackle.
"No one believed that the construction of the temple will start at Ram Janmabhoomi but the temple is being built," he said.
He said when he was in charge of the BJP's Uttar Pradesh campaign in 2014, Akhilesh Yadav used to taunt that the BJP wouldn't give the date for the temple construction.
“Now, Akhilesh Babu you can see that a temple that will touch the skies is being built there," the BJP leader said.
He said in the past seven years electricity has reached everyone, arrangement for free medical treatment of up to Rs 5 lakh made and during the Covid pandemic the government took care of 60 crore poor people nationwide.
The new university located in Behat assembly constituency here will be constructed over 50 acres at a cost of Rs 92 crore.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)