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BJP plays up 1990 Ayodhya firing on 31st anniversary of incident
The BJP attack came a day after Union home minister Amit Shah had set the tone for the 2022 UP poll campaign, referring to the Ayodhya firing
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday played up the police firing on kar sevaks in Ayodhya on the 31st anniversary of the incident that took place during the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led rule on October 30, 1990. While chief minister Yogi Adityanath made a mention of the incident, the BJP shared a video of the police firing on its official @BJP4UP twitter handle.
The BJP attack came a day after Union home minister Amit Shah had set the tone for the 2022 UP poll campaign, referring to the Ayodhya firing. He had stated that while kar sevaks were killed during Samajwadi Party (SP) rule, the dream of a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya was set to be fulfilled under the BJP.
Shah had made these remarks during a meeting of the party’s booth level cadres from the Awadh region in Lucknow. The party has now planned events at Kashi (Varanasi), west UP, Braj, Gorakhpur and Kanpur regions. The next big meeting that Shah is likely to attend in UP would be in Varanasi on November 12. The entire BJP top brass is expected to be present for that. Varanasi is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency and a key region in Purvanchal or eastern UP.
“The Ayodhya firing discourse would gain traction as elections draw close because such issues come in handy for political parties to cater to their respective vote banks,” said Irshad Ilmi, a political observer.
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath, too, has begun playing up the Ayodhya firing incident, stating that had there been a BJP government in UP in 1990, none would have dared to open fire at the kar sevaks.
Adityanath has also been referring to the late Kalyan Singh, who was the UP chief minister when the Babri mosque at Ayodhya was demolished on December 6, 1992. Kalyan Singh had admitted that unlike in 1990 when police got permission to open fire at kar sevaks, he denied a similar request to the security forces in writing two years later.
After the 1990 Ayodhya firing, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the BJP had coined the term ‘Mullah Mulayam’ (cleric Mulayam). In the run- up to the 2022 UP polls, chief minister Yogi Adityanath had recently sought to rebuild on the theme by referring to Mulayam Singh Yadav, the father of Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav as “abba jaan” (meaning father in Urdu).
ENDORSEMENT OF YOGI ADITYANATH
Union home minister Amit Shah’s aggressive backing of chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s leadership on Friday, urging the people to re-elect the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under him to power in Uttar Pradesh appeared to have settled the leadership issue.
“He took the chief minister’s name 17 times in 32 minutes, linked his return as chief minister of UP to Prime Minister Narendra Modi again returning to power at the Centre for the third time in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, spoke of how UP has developed under him and made a detailed comparison between his stint as well as that of the SP,” a BJP leader said.
Since May-June, the BJP top brass have made it clear that the party would go into the 2022 UP polls with Yogi at the helm.
However, Shah on Friday made it clear that if the BJP returns to power, Adityanath would again be the party’s chief ministerial choice. Shah also patted Yogi for fulfilling 90% of the promises made in the party’s 2017 manifesto that was released by him.
“I think in two months’ time that remain, if you could complete the remaining promises too, we could proudly state that BJP has fulfilled all the promises in the manifesto,” Shah had said.
