Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav has mounted an attack on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Uttar Pradesh, calling it “NRC in disguise” and alleging a conspiracy to remove voters opposed to the BJP.
Speaking in Hyderabad on Saturday, where he is attending the Vision India – AI Summit, Yadav said the Election Commission should focus on increasing voter participation instead of enabling large-scale deletions from the rolls.
“More than three crore votes are at risk of being cut in Uttar Pradesh,” he claimed.
“If such large-scale vote removal happens, and if the BJP and the Election Commission are conspiring to delete votes where the BJP has lost, it amounts to a conspiracy in democracy. This is not the intended purpose of the SIR. This is not SIR. This is NRC (National Register of Citizens) in the guise of SIR. They could not directly implement the NRC. Now they have brought NRC. If the NRC is ever implemented, what documents have to be given? The same papers have to be presented,” he said.
Yadav also compared the inconvenience faced by people during the SIR exercise to earlier policy decisions. According to him, citizens are being troubled in the same way they were during demonetisation, the Covid-19 period and the rollout of GST.
On the ongoing Parliament Winter Session, he remarked that the most striking development was that “some people, who have never sung Vande Mataram suddenly wanted to do so.”
The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s Hyderabad visit has also had a political focus. He met Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy and later held discussions with BRS leaders, including working president K T Rama Rao.
An official release said Reddy briefed Yadav on his government’s development and welfare programmes.
Yadav praised Reddy’s decision to recognise ‘Sadar’, a festival celebrated by the Yadav community in Hyderabad, as a state festival. The release quoted him as saying that the Yadav community would always remember Revanth Reddy for the decision.
After meeting BRS leaders, Yadav said negativity in politics should end and the emphasis should be on progress. He added that he had also spoken to BRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao and would meet him soon.
Rama Rao said his party draws inspiration from the Samajwadi Party’s performance in the Lok Sabha elections, where it won 37 seats despite being out of power in Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav used the platform in Hyderabad to explain the thinking behind “Vision India”, the party’s new national programme announced on November 11.
Speaking about the AI summit, he said, “… Every day, through newspapers and media, we see that the influence of AI is growing at every level, across all sectors, be it agriculture, healthcare, or any other. That is why I am organising Vision India in Hyderabad. The aim of Vision India is that the country should run as per a vision. How should Neo-India move forward, and in which direction?”
He added that politics should be about vision and not division, and praised the youth, calling them progressive, tolerant, inclusive and those who reject the “division” of society.