Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, campaigning for the state polls next year, said at a rally yesterday that before he came to power, daughters, sisters, buffalos and bulls were unsafe.
"Whenever our workers stayed anywhere, women of the family asked, will we ever feel safe? Earlier our daughters, sisters felt unsafe. Even if a bullock cart went through western UP, buffaloes and bulls didn't feel safe," the Chief Minister said at a workshop of party spokespersons at the state BJP headquarters in Lucknow yesterday.
"These problems were seen in Western UP, not eastern UP. But it is not the same today. Can you not see the difference? Today, buffalos, bulls or women... can they be picked up forcibly? Isn't this a difference? What was Uttar Pradesh's identity? Wherever potholes started, that was UP; wherever there was darkness, that was UP. Any civilised person feared walking on the streets at night. But not today," Yogi Adityanath said.
The Chief Minister is yet to get past the controversy over his "abba jaan" dig at the previous Samajwadi Party government.
He said earlier, only "people who say abba jaan (Urdu for father)" were allowed to consume state-subsidised food before 2017.
"Because then, people who say 'abba jaan' used to digest the rations. The rations of Kushinagar used to go to Nepal and Bangladesh. Today, if anybody tries to consume the rations meant for poor people, he will land in jail," the Chief Minister said at an event in Kushinagar on Sunday.
The comment was slammed by rival politicians and also called out on Twitter as communal.
The Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government, which won a huge majority in UP on 2017, will seek a second straight term next year.
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