Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday visited Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav's parliamentary constituency Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh and met family members of jailed anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters, asserting that raising one's voice in a democracy is not a crime.
Accusing the BJP governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh of trying to destroy the Constitution, she dubbed both as "anti-poor and anti-people".
"Whatever happened with you was wrong, it was an injustice. All of us will stand against the injustice. The government, at the Centre and in UP, is anti-people and anti-poor. It is working to destroy the Constitution. If you and we do not save it, the Constitution will be destroyed," she warned people.
"You have seen the BJP government in Uttarakhand say that reservation is not a constitutional right," she said, alleging that the state government was talking of destroying the Constitution.
"You all have to stand up because all the laws which they are planning to bring in are not against one community, but against the entire Constitution," she said amid slogan shouting by the crowd.
Asserting that the Congress will stand with peaceful protesters, the party general secretary said, "I heard stories of women. I went to Bijnor, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Lucknow and Varanasi and other places where the police and the administration committed atrocities. A report was drafted by our party and given to the NHRC."
"The Congress party stands by you today, it will stand by you tomorrow, and will continue to stand by you until you get justice," she added.
Several Muslim women had staged a protest in Azamgarh against the amended Citizenship Act and the proposed creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) but were dispersed by the police.
An FIR was registered against 35 identified and over 100 unidentified people involved in the protests that day. Of them, 20 people were arrested, police had said.
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