No remedy if someone makes up mind to blame an outfit: UP CM

Lucknow: Faced with charges of right-wing activists repeatedly taking law in their hand in Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath today said there is “no remedy if someone makes up his or her mind” to blame a particular outfit.

He was responding to a question by mediapersons here about the Saharanpur clash in which an MP and a senior police official was injured and the Bulandshahr lynching in which alleged Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) activists were arrested and that his warnings on the law-and-order front are not having the desired impact.

“There is no remedy if someone makes up his mind that he has to blame a particular outfit… you will have to take this into consideration that the victims have already stated that not any outfit but dispute among themselves was the cause of incidents,” the Chief Minister said.

“I can say with confidence that everyone will be safe in the state without any discrimination and rule of law is the priority of the state government,” he said.

In Saharanpur, local MP Raghav Lakhanpal Sharma, a senior police officer and several others were injured in stone pelting between members of two communities during a rally on April 20 to mark Ambedkar Jayanti. In Sohi village of Bulandshahr, a man was beaten to death by right-wing activists on May 2 after an inter-faith couple eloped. Yesterday, UP police’s press statement said that Hindu Yuva Vahini activists were allegedly involved in the lynching incident.

The Chief Minister had recently directed the HYV workers to maintain a decent behaviour and not to misuse the colour saffron as the image of the outfit or that of the BJP would suffer.

Adityanath is the founder of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a social, cultural and nationalist group of youth who seek to provide rightist Hindu platform. He had founded the organisation in April 2002.

“You might not be accepting the change in Uttar Pradesh in the past one and a half month but the entire country is accepting it on law and order… investment opportunities have been created and people’s confidence has grown,” the chief minister said.

Regretting the state’s poor rating in ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’, with only one city, Varanasi, figuring in the list of 100 clean cities of the country, he said as many as nine of the 15 most dirty districts are in Uttar Pradesh.

“Although this survey was taken up before we took over (came to power in UP), our government has decided to work in this area and by December declare 30 districts open defecation free. By October next year, the entire state will be declared open defecation free,” Adityanath said.

On the Lucknow Metro project, the chief minister said operations on about 8 km stretch in the first phase is likely to start by next month.