CM should go to US despite my insult: Azam

UP minister Azam Khan on Tuesday put the interests of his state before his injured pride and said chief minister Akhilesh Yadav should go ahead with his United States visit in July despite the former’s “humiliating” detention at Boston airport last month. Manish Chandra Pandey reports.

UP minister Azam Khan on Tuesday put the interests of his state before his injured pride and said chief minister Akhilesh Yadav should go ahead with his United States visit in July despite the former’s “humiliating” detention at Boston airport last month.

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“My humiliation cannot be linked to that July visit. They are different issues. I would like the chief minister to visit the United States. Uttar Pradesh’s welfare is more important than me. While I am grateful to the chief minister for siding with me after my humiliation in the US, personally speaking I was in favour of his going ahead with his Harvard lecture (which Yadav cancelled),” he said.

“It was a collective decision to call off the Harvard lecture in protest against the ill-treatment meted out to me by US officials in Boston,” Khan told Hindustan Times on the phone from Rampur on Monday after returning from South Africa, where the chartered flight he was travelling in landed at a military airbase in Pretoria, invoking protests there.