Mughalsarai Station In UP Renamed, Arvind Kejriwal Takes A Dig

Lucknow: The Mughalsarai railway station in Uttar Pradesh, one of India's oldest, has been renamed Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction after one of the BJP's tallest icons.

The central government had last year cleared UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's request to rename the station, despite protests raised in parliament by various parties.

This morning, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders were among the first to tweet.

Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, tweeted in Hindi, "If you vote BJP, then names of cities and stations will change. If you vote AAP, then the future of your children will change."
 The AAP chief posted the message while retweeting his Deputy Manish Sisodia's tweet, which said the Yogi Adityanath government would do well to focus on improving the state of government schools and colleges instead of renaming places.

There were more critical tweets.

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"Who says that the Yogi government isn't working? Amidst all the heavy work done to provide oxygen to children at Gorakhpur Hospital, beating up people for Cows, & battering women thru Romeo squads, Yogi still got time to change the name of Mughalsarai Jn to Pandit Deendayal Jn! (sic)," tweeted lawyer Prashant Bhushan, the founder of Swaraj Abhiyan.

The Mughalsarai station was set up in 1862 when the East India Company linked Howrah to Delhi by rail. Since it was an overnight stopover for caravans, it was named "Mughal Sarai (Inn)".

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Deen Dayal Upadhyay's connection to Mughalsarai is his death under mysterious circumstances at that station in 1968.

On his birth anniversary last year, the UP government put up the proposal to rename the railway station.