Lucknow:

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has taken a swipe at Akhilesh Yadav’s “PDA” plank, saying that it means “Production house of Dangai (rioters) and Apradhi (criminals)”. The Samajwadi Party chief uses the abbreviation for pichde (backward classes), Dalits and alpsankhyak (minorities) and has been using the expression since the general election earlier this year.

“Samajwadi Party talks about PDA. Let me tell you what PDA is. It’s production house of dangai (rioters) and apradhi (criminals). We are giving it a new definition. The bigger a criminal is, the bigger a rioter is, they are part of Samajwadi Party’s production house,” he said at a gathering in Uttar Pradesh’s Ambedkar Nagar. The Katehari Assembly seat in Ambedkar Nagar district is among the nine seats in Uttar Pradesh going to the polls. The election has been necessitated after Samajwadi Party MLA Lalji Verma was elected to Lok Sabha.

“Every criminal, mafia, rapist is born in this production house. And Akhilesh Yadav is its CEO,” the Chief Minister said, referring to allegations against Samajwadi Party leaders in rape cases in Ayodhya and Kannauj. “Dekh Sapai, bitiya ghabrai (Daughters are scared when they see Samajwadi Party leaders)”, he said in another rally at Majhawan in Mirzapur district. Here, sitting MLA Dr Vinod Bind is now a Lok Sabha MP.

“Remember, this is the region, (mafia boss) Khan Mubarak was their disciple, wasn’t he? Mukhtar Ansari was their disciple, Ateeq Ahmed too. They looted the poor, captured the land of the weak and disrupted social harmony,” he said, adding that the “double engine government” of the BJP at the state and Centre ended their era.

Mr Yadav is yet to respond to the Chief Minister’s jab. But in a post on X after the Chief Minister made the remarks, the Kannauj MP said farmers are queuing up to get fertilisers for crops. He shared a photograph of people waiting outside a distribution centre. “PDA is saying, we don’t want BJP,” he wrote in the post. 

The campaign for the bypolls to nine Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, where Samajwadi Party scored big in this general election, has heated up and both sides are launching verbal attacks at rivals.

Earlier, Mr Yadav hit out at the Chief Minister. “A person who does not consider anyone to be bigger than him, what kind of a yogi is he? If there is anybody who is setting the seers against each other, it’s the people in the government,” he said in an apparent swipe at Mr Adityanath.