‘Dictatorship or emergency?’: SP chief questions barricading on Eid

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Monday accused the state police of putting up barricades unnecessarily and claimed that he too was stopped on his way to Eidgah here. He said the Samajwadi Party would oppose the Waqf Amendment Bill in Parliament.

“There has not been such barricading. The police stopped me when I was coming here. I was stopped for about half an hour. The officers had no reply when I wanted to know about the reasons for being stopped. Is it dictatorship or emergency? Do they want to put pressure not to allow participation in programmes of others,” said Yadav while speaking to media persons at the Eidgah.

Yadav said he has been visiting Eidgah consistently after ‘Netaji’ (Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav) brought him there. He said, “I have been coming here consistently.”

About the opposition against the Waqf Amendment Bill with reports of Muslims wearing black bands to protest the bill, he said, “Several political parties are opposed to the Waqf Amendment Bill and the Samajwadi Party too opposes this bill.”

He said the BJP government’s moves like the scrapping of reservation of seats Anglo Indian community in Parliament and state legislative assemblies and the implementation of the GST etc had not helped the people. Yadav alleged that the implementation of GST has led to corruption and has had an adverse impact on the trade.

He targeted the BJP government for “failing to bring about an improvement on the front or law and order situation” and said “the state government’s own data indicated that women are not safe in Uttar Pradesh”.

The SP chief said: “The state government has been speaking about zero tolerance against crime and the same has been turned into zero on the law-and-order front.” He also targeted the state government on the issue of checking corruption.