Amit Shah targets prev govts for selling off sugar mills

Saharanpur: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday accused the previous State governments of conspiring to sell off cooperative sugar mills and targeted them for failing to control criminals, alluding also to the "exodus" of Hindus from another western UP town a few years back. With the next assembly elections just months away, the BJP leader praised the Yogi Adityanath government, saying it has ensured the rapid clearing of the backlog of payments to sugarcane farmers.

Apart from Punjab and Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh -- on which Shah is focusing his campaign -- contributed the most to the protest over the recently repealed farm laws. Bhartiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait hails from this region. Shah was addressing a rally here after laying the foundation stone for the Maa Shakumbhari Devi University. He also referred to the ongoing construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the enactment of a law against instant triple talaq and the abrogation of special status under Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir, giving the credit for them to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Shah hit out at Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav over law and order, comparing crime statistics during his term as chief minister with those under Adityanath's BJP government. "From which spectacles does Akhilesh ji see," he asked, and also claimed there was a "mafia raj" under Yadav and criminals "felicitated".

Without naming Shamli's Kairana town or elaborating on the details, the home minister said when he came to Saharanpur itself ahead of the 2017 polls, people asked him what the party intended to do about the "palayan" (exodus, migration). "I told them that people who are making them flee will themselves flee from Uttar Pradesh if a Bharatiya Janata Party government comes to power," Shah said.