With the opposition questioning police crackdown on those protesting against the citizenship law in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to mount a counter offensive by getting its top leaders to tour the state to hold awareness meetings on the CAA on Sunday.
BJP’s officiating chief JP Nadda would be in Ghaziabad while defence minister Rajnath Singh will hold a similar campaign in Lucknow, his Lok Sabha constituency. Rajnath is scheduled to visit Justice Khemkaran at his Kanpur road residence and later meet Dr Sudhir Srivastava at his Singar Nagar residence as part of the party’s efforts to interact with influential people on the issue.
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath would be in Gorakhpur, deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma in Moradabad and Agra to take the party’s message on the issue to the public.
The BJP’s decision to roll out its big guns comes in the wake of an opposition campaign to target the party over the law and the subsequent police crackdown on protestors.
“We are telling the people that citizenship law doesn’t take anyone’s citizenship rights. It’s an enabling bill,” says UP BJP lawmaker and general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak. Pathak, the party’s west UP in-charge would also be part of the awareness campaign. ‘
{{/usCountry}}“We are telling the people that citizenship law doesn’t take anyone’s citizenship rights. It’s an enabling bill,” says UP BJP lawmaker and general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak. Pathak, the party’s west UP in-charge would also be part of the awareness campaign. ‘
{{/usCountry}}“There is a lot of propaganda about Citizenship Law violating Article 14. That’s far from the truth and we are telling it to the people. Moreover, the matter is in the Supreme Court and the opposition canard would be fully exposed soon,” says UP BJP spokesman Harish Srivastava.
Boosting the BJP campaign would be minorities minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in Rampur, minister for petroleum and natural gas Dharmendra Pradhan in Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, UP BJP general secretary (organisation) Sunil Bansal, a key RSS appointee in Uttar Pradesh BJP would do a mass contact in Gautam Buddha Nagar while UP BJP chief Swatantra Dev Singh doing similar thing in Bareilly.