Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath of the BJP has taken a swipe at leaders of rival parties who he said did not bother to come out of "home isolation" at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Elections to the UP assembly are just months away.
At a party event in UP's Etawah, Yogi Adityanath asked BJP supporters to ensure the "leaders who sat at home during Covid should be made to remain there" in the elections.
"I was among you when Covid was at its peak. If you remember, I came here twice amid the pandemic to monitor the situation and meet with frontline health professionals," the Chief Minister said and raised his hands, to which the crowd cheered, in a video by news agency ANI.
"But leaders of other parties were in home isolation. So they have a right to remain at home even during the elections. Make sure they stay at home," Yogi Adityanath told the audience, who clapped and cheered again.
"...They were busy on Twitter. So tell them, babua, Twitter will vote for you," the Chief Minister added, and smiled.
The UP government's handling of the Covid second wave was, however, criticised after visuals of bodies floating down rivers emerged on social media, indicating at a crisis that had gone very wrong. Cases of medical oxygen shortage in hospitals had made matters worse, although this problem was reported from across the country when the Covid spike took hospitals off-guard in the second wave.
The UP government maintains that it handled the pandemic well and did everything it could to help hospitals and health professionals deal with the crisis.
Strategies to win a string of assembly elections next year, including the battle for UP, will be a top priority agenda at the BJP's national executive meeting on Sunday. The results of by-elections in several states earlier this week showed that the Congress had clawed back some lost ground, but the opposition's advance wasn't significant enough to make the BJP worried.
Still, the BJP at the crucial meeting on Sunday will study in detail how the party is doing in states like West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Assembly elections will be held early next year in five states -- Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur. Elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat will be held in late 2022. Except Punjab, the BJP is in power in all these states.
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