No ‘bahubalis’ in Yogi rule, just Bajrang Bali, says Amit Shah

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday hit out at Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati, claiming she feared defeat in the upcoming assembly polls and urging her to step out for campaigning.
He also invoked Lord Hanuman to praise the Yogi Adityanath government, saying no “bahubalis” (musclemen) were visible under his regime, but just “Bajrang Bali”.

Addressing a public meeting in BJP’s Jan Vishwas Yatra in Moradabad, Shah said, “The SP (Samajwadi Party) and BSP cannot develop UP. Behenji ki to abhi thand hi nahi udi hai. Yeh bhaibheet hain. Behanji chunav aa gaya thoda bahar nikaliye. Baad me yeh na kehna ki maine prachar nahi kiya. (Behenji is yet to get relief from cold weather. She is fearing (defeat). Behenji, step out as elections have come. Don’t say later that you had not campaigned),” he said.

The Union minister said even if “bua, babua and behen (referring to Mayawati, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and Congress’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra)” came together, they cannot win against BJP workers.

Shah coined another acronym to attack the SP, BSP and Congress, saying the ‘Nizam’ system meant “shashan” (administration), but for the three parties, it stood for — Naseemuddin (Siddiqui), Imran Masood, Azam Khan and Mukhtar Ansari. “Do you want the Nizam of Naseemuddin, Imran, Azam and Mukhtar or Yogi’s Nizam of development?” Shah asked the audience, urging them to ensure BJP’s win in all six assembly seats in Moradabad. Siddiqui and Masood are from Congress; Khan is an SP MP; and Ansari is BSP MLA from Mau.

Shah said the Nizam of SP, BSP and Congress were symbols of corruption, crime, hooliganism and anarchy. “UP people have made up their mind to repeat the rule of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath that has built a grand temple at the Ram Janmabhoomi…” Shah said.

Targeting Akhilesh for mentioning Muhammad Ali Jinnah in his earlier speech, Shah said, “He does know name of ganna (sugarcane) and keep repeating Jinnah, Jinnah, Jinnah…Jinnah is of no use here. He had gone to Pakistan. Here, ganna is of use. When you were in power, payments were not made to sugarcane farmers. The BJP government made the payments and cleared dues. It expanded and modernised sugar mills.”

Referring to SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s 2014 remarks that “boys will be boys… they make mistakes,” the minister said the SP government with such a mindset cannot protect women.

Using another acronym, he alleged that the SP, BSP and Congress had turned UP into a LAB of loot, atankwad, and bhrastachar (loot, terrorism and corruption).

Urging the people to vote for the BJP, Shah said his party needed to win to ensure “land mafia like Azam Khan” remained in jail.

In another public meeting in Aligarh, Shah alleged that general public especially “our daughters and sisters” were harassed by “bahubalis” during the SP government in the state. “The land was grabbed. But today in the regime of Yogi Adityanath, ‘baahubalis’ (musclemen) are not visible, but only ‘Bajrang Bali’ could be seen,” he said.

He said the late BJP leader Kalyan Singh, who was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when the Babri Mosque was demolished in 1992, had shown what “good governance” is. “Babuji (as Kalyan Singh is called by his supporters) had sacrificed his chair for Ram Janmabhoomi.”

— with PTI inputs