Bahraich violence orchestrated, journalist who shot video thrashed: Akhilesh Yadav
Lucknow, Oct 17: Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday alleged that the communal violence in Bahraich district was deliberately orchestrated by the state administration.
The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister also wondered why there was "no police security" when "such a big event" was being organised.
Yadav alleged the BJP was working on the British's "Divide and Rule" policy and also claimed that the journalist who shot a video of the first breakout of violence was thrashed by the BJP workers.
Violence broke out in Maharajganj in the Mahsi tehsil of Bahraich district on Sunday allegedly over loud music being played outside a place of worship during a Durga Puja immersion procession.
Ram Gopal Mishra, 22, part of the passing group, died of a gunshot wound in the ensuing violence.
The death triggered a series of flagrant incidents in the area with angry mobs torching several houses, shops, showrooms, hospitals, and vehicles.
"This is the failure of the Bahraich administration and the government. They talk about zero tolerance and conduct every event very peacefully. So why was there no police security when such a big event was being organised?" Yadav asked, speaking to reporters in Lucknow.
"Was the administration not aware of how and what was happening there?" he said.
The SP president also raised questions about the use of firearms during the arrest of the men accusing of being involved in the killing, and said the government "ruined" the police of the state.
"This is a matter of a neighbouring district. You must know better than I do that this incident (Bahraich violence) did not happen, but was deliberately orchestrated," he said.
"I have even heard that the journalist who made the first video of the procession in Bahraich was injured in his hands or legs. BJP workers beat him. If they are beating journalists or sending them to jail in false cases, then one can surmise what they must be hiding," Yadav said.
He said that his party will ensure that grieving families get justice.
"Britishers gave divide and rule slogan. This government is working on it and the common man knows this," Yadav said.
Earlier in the day, police in Bahraich arrested five men, wounding two with gunshots in an encounter. The arrests were made in connection with the Sunday killing.
Police have so far registered 11 FIRs and arrested 55 suspects in connection with the Sunday murder and subsequent violence, according to officials.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
