After Ghazipur district administration denied permission to organize “raths” TravelEver since Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to inaugurate it on Purvanchal Expressway on Tuesday, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav on Monday said his party would offer flowers in a symbolic form at the inauguration of the expressway. He postponed his party’s Rath Yatra by a day till November 17.
Modi’s program Inauguration of 341 km long expressway, which connects Ghazipur with Lucknow in Sultanpur on Tuesday.
Akhilesh told the media here that under the SP’s plan, he had to reach one of the last villages of the expressway by helicopter and was planning to go to Azamgarh on a chariot.
“The expressway will be inaugurated by the Prime Minister at Sultanpur airstrip, which is about 100 km from Azamgarh. What is the threat to them from me?” He asked.
“We wanted to travel on the expressway built in the previous Samajwadi government. But no one is allowed to use the expressway in the name of the opening ceremony and boulders have been put up at the entry points. In Sultanpur, the police is keeping a watch on our party leaders and some of them have been placed under house arrest… May be SP workers carry their cycles on their shoulders and ride them on Purvanchal Expressway. Who will stop them? They [BJP] I have no idea or vision,” said Akhilesh.
He also said that the BJP government changed the name of the expressway “built during his tenure” from Samajwadi Purvanchal Expressway to Purvanchal Expressway.
Earlier in the day, Ghazipur District Magistrate Mangala Prasad Singh said that the district administration does not have the authority to issue permission for “rath yatra” as the expressway for public transport is yet to be inaugurated. He said the administration has asked the SP leaders to either change their schedule or change the route of the yatra.
Meanwhile, Akhilesh accused the BJP government of compromising on the quality of the expressway to cut the project cost and inaugurating it before the assembly elections to take credit for it.
“To make it cheap, its quality has been compromised. To take credit before the elections, BJP is going to inaugurate the half-baked Purvanchal Expressway.
The former chief minister also claimed that the government had taken away the expressway work from companies that could have built better roads. However, he did not name the companies. “Those companies are doing the best work in the country. Had he built an expressway, it would have been better than the Agra-Lucknow expressway.
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