Lucknow: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday accused the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government of complete administrative failure, saying the state’s law and order situation has “become zero”.
Reacting to the alleged gang-rape of a minor girl in Lucknow, Yadav said the incident exposed the hollowness of the government’s claims of “zero tolerance” towards crime.
“The law and order of the state has become zero,” he said, adding that corruption, injustice and oppression were rampant under the BJP rule.
He also questioned the effectiveness of police encounters. “If encounters were the antidote for improving law and order, then their thousands of such actions would have yielded results,” Yadav said.
Accusing the government of misusing the police, the former chief minister alleged that officers were being directed to pursue political agendas and file false cases against opposition leaders instead of focusing on crime control.
“When the BJP uses the police for political matters, the law and order are bound to deteriorate. This is the reason why women are unsafe on a very large scale,” he said.
Referring to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, Yadav claimed Uttar Pradesh had recorded the highest number of crimes against Dalits and members of the PDA (pichde, Dalit, alpsankhyak – backward classes, Dalits and minorities) communities under the current government.
He accused Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath of trying to conceal his government’s failures. “The BJP wants to hide its failures. Sitting on a white table, the Chief Minister speaks lies. While they meet people from such positions, the truth is that the most oppression, injustice, and such serious crime incidents are continuously happening in Uttar Pradesh. It is not just incidents; the limits of corruption have been crossed,” Yadav said.
Citing a recent case, he said a revenue officer (lekhpal) in Kanpur was found in possession of illegal assets worth around Rs 100 crore, reflecting deep-rooted corruption in the system.
He further alleged that both the health and education departments had failed to serve the people.
Yadav also criticized the administration for preventing Samajwadi Party workers from garlanding the statue of Jayaprakash Narayan on his birth anniversary on Saturday.
“The call for revolution by JP was done because unemployment and corruption had peaked,” he said.
Yadav also paid tributes to socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia on his death anniversary.