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Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Vijay Yatra concludes after all-night journey on Purvanchal Expressway
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav says the yatra will come to a stop in the true sense when his party regains power in Uttar Pradesh
Samajwadi Party (SP) national president Akhilesh Yadav finished his Samajwadi Vijay Yatra in Lucknow at 4am on Thursday after having covered the entire stretch of the newly inaugurated 341 kilometre Purvanchal Expressway.
Describing the yatra as one of the longest by the “Samajwadi people”, he said it would come to a stop in the true sense when his party regains power in the state.
The yatra was a “symbolic reiteration” that the expressway was the previous SP government’s project, a claim that Yadav has often made.
In a tweet at around midnight, Akhilesh Yadav quoted noted American poet Robert Frost’s verse: “But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep”.
The tweet also had pictures of the SP chief on the rath surrounded by supporters.
“With great difficulties comes a night...that brings in a new dawn. Now, there will be a new morning, there will be a change in 2022 (assembly polls),” he said in another tweet in Hindi, at the end of the nearly 17-hour Samajwadi Vijay Yatra.
The fourth leg of the yatra had begun at the zero point of the Purvanchal Expressway at Haideria village in Ghazipur at around 11am on Wednesday. It ended at Chand Sarai village (the 341 km point) of the Purvanchal Expressway in Lucknow on Thursday.
Standing atop his Benz bus converted into a rath, Akhilesh Yadav said: “This leg of the yatra has ended at 4am. I think this is one of the longest yatras of Samajwadi (SP) people, but in the real sense, I think the yatra hasn’t ended...It will go on and will stop when we see the SP government back.”
After setting out from Ghazipur at 11am on Wednesday, the yatra reached Mau around 3pm, Azamgarh at 7.30pm, Ambedkarnagar around 10.30pm, the Sultanpur airstrip on the expressway at midnight, Ayodhya at 1.30am, Barabanki around 2.30am and Lucknow around 4am.
“Originally, the yatra was to end in Lucknow on Wednesday evening. But with many unscheduled halts due to the crowd of supporters along the way, Akhilesh’s yatra went on all night,” said SP state spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary.
Akhilesh Yadav undertook the Samajwadi VIjay Yatra on the Purvanchal Expressway the morning after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Purvanchal Expressway at the emergency airstrip for Indian Air Force (IAF) in Sultanpur on Tuesday.
The same day, the SP cadres did “symbolic floral inauguration” of the expressway, calling it the Samajwadi Purvanchal Expressway.
Akhilesh Yadav has repeatedly been saying that the expressway was a project of his government, which the BJP government was claiming as its own now.
PM Modi had inaugurated the expressway on Tuesday afternoon after landing on the 3.2 km emergency airstrip in a C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft of the IAF. An air show by IAF involving combat jets followed the inauguration.
At the start of his yatra on the Purvanchal Expressway in Ghazipur, Akhilesh Yadav had said on Wednesday: “This expressway is incomplete yet. Samajwadis saw the dream and conceived the plan to build it to cut the travel time between Ghazipur (in UP) and New Delhi. It was to be an expressway to prosperity. They couldn’t make a better road than this in the entire country. After SP government comes to power, it will build mandis (markets) along the expressway and take the expressway to Ballia and connect it with Bihar.”
Responding to the Akhilesh’s yatra, political analyst Professor SK Dwivedi, who is former head of the department of political science at Lucknow University, said: “It’s high time that political parties shelve identify politics of caste, religion, Jinnah etc. They should do development politics. They should not fight over who made what. The expressway is built and it’s a good thing for the state, the country and its people. Credit should be given to both those who conceived it, and those who built it.”
This was the fourth leg of Akhilesh’s Samajwadi Vijay Yatra. The first leg of the yatra was taken out on October 12 and 13 in Kanpur, Hamirpur, Jalaun and Kanpur Dehat. The second one was in Hardoi on October 31. The third was from Gorakhpur to Kushinagar on November 13.
