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Yogi to contest from Ayodhya

KT NEWS SERVICE. Dated: 1/13/2022 8:47:29 PM

NEW DELHI, Jan 12: Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced in a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party's leaders from Uttar Pradesh here Tuesday night that Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath should contest the upcoming Assembly polls from Ayodhya to send out a message of the aggressive "Hindutva" to the party workers and supporters.

The meeting, which was attended by Adityanath as also deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya and state BJP chief Swatantra Dev Singh, discussed this strategy to counter its OBC ministers and MLAs quitting the party to fight back the aggression of the backward castes.

Shah was reportedly quoted stating that “the CM contesting from Ayodhya would help the party highlight the narrative it has been emphasising on since it took up construction of the grand Ram Temple there."

Yogi was reportedly not happy at Shah's decision since he had plans to contest from his traditional homeground of Gorakhpur where he is popular as a head of a temple. The party sources said he meekly protested, but Shah shut him down after all endorsed the idea.

In a related development, the UP government moved a local court to issue an arrest warrant against Swami Prasad Maurya, who quit the Yogi cabinet on Tuesday, in a 7-year old case of 2014 when he had made a derogatory and objectionable remarks against the Hindu gods as then a MLA of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The arrest warrant was issued by judge Yogesh Kumar Yadav, on the pretext of Maurya not attending the court hearing slated on Wednesday.

An arrest warrant was issued against him in the same case in 2016, but it was stayed by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The case was not pursued all these years since Maurya had then joined the BJP and became a minister in the Yogi government.