Rahul Gandhi hits out at Mulayam on his home turf

Mainpuri (Uttar Pradesh) : Hitting out at Mulayam Singh Yadav in his pocket borough here, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi said Tuesday the Samajwadi Party chief was making promises galore to the people but had done nothing for their benefit when he was in power.

“Mulayam Singh Yadav is busy making tall promises, assuring free electricity and free water and has also gone to the extent of promising free treatment abroad to common people suffering from major ailments. But I wish to ask him whether he did any bit of these things during his stints as chief minister,” Gandhi said at an election rally in this western Uttar Pradesh district.

“Mulayam’s track record says that during his three stints as chief minister, the people of Uttar Pradesh received only few hours of electricity. The only thing they received were bills for electricity the people never saw,” he alleged.

Asking the crowds whether they had been happy during the regimes of Samajwadi Party or the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party, he received an emphatic “No”.

Gandhi stressed that the state’s youth had the capability of transforming Uttar Pradesh, but because of absence of employment avenues here, they had to migrate to other states to earn their livelihood.

“When Delhi slept, workers from UP made the Metro, but today they do not have the resources to travel in that very Metro,” he said, adding the Congress party decided to evolve a scheme like rural job guarantee programme “to ensure at least 100 days of employment in a year to people in the rural areas”.

He regretted how the scheme was discouraged by Mulayam Singh, who refused to implement it in Uttar Pradesh during his tenure till 2007. “It was ironical that he was now promising unemployment allowance to the youth.”

Gandhi also noted that the Samajwadi Party chief was now claiming to convert Bundelkhand into Israel “but when that very region was hit by a severe drought during his chief ministership, he simply ignored the demands of the people”.

“Subsequently, I took the people of Bundelkhand to the prime minister who promptly agreed to give the area a special economic package of Rs.8,000 crore.”

“But the money never reached the people because Mayawati’s magic elephant ate it up.”

Underlining his role in getting weavers and farmers across the country a massive loan-waiver, Gandhi made a passionate appeal to the people to vote for the Congress.

“You need hospitals, schools, colleges and employment, which can come only with progress. That can be truly ensured if a Congress government was installed here.”