New Delhi: On a day when the Allahabad High Court was set to hear Uttar Pradesh Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu’s bail plea, party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra hit out at the state’s Yogi Adityanath government for Lallu’s continued arrest.
In a column in the Congress-affiliated newspaper Navjivan India, she slammed the government for being “scared and undemocratic” and said that Lallu is entitled to justice.
“This is the twentieth time he has been detained by a scared, undemocratic government,” she wrote.
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‘Man for whom struggle is a chosen reality’
Lallu has been under arrest since 20 May on allegations of forging documents regarding the buses arranged by the Congress to ferry migrant workers home. He was arrested twice that day — first in Agra, for protesting against the UP government’s decision not to grant permission to allow the buses to enter the state. He was subsequently granted bail, but arrested again for allegedly providing fake documents.
“First, on 17 May, they rejected our proposal and sent 500 buses back from the UP border. On 18 May, they accepted our proposal and asked for the buses’ documents,” Priyanka Gandhi wrote.
“Meanwhile, the government started fierce propaganda and accused us of giving a fake list,” she added.
The column was published hours before Lallu’s bail hearing is scheduled to take place in the Allahabad High Court. His bail plea was earlier denied by a special MP-MLA court on 1 June.
Recalling her time with Lallu travelling across various districts of Uttar Pradesh, she wrote that struggle was an important constituent of Lallu’s life.
“Ajay Lallu was a Class 6 student when he hit the road. He would sell firecrackers on Diwali, compost during sowing season, and salt on other days,” she wrote.
“Driven by the supreme spirit of struggle for the victims, and uncomfortable with the drawing-room politics of many of his peers, UP Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu is a man for whom struggle is a chosen reality.”
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Resentment within Congress over silence
The column has been written at a time when questions have been raised about the lack of a strong stand by the Congress leadership on Lallu’s arrest over the last three weeks. Interim president Sonia Gandhi hasn’t spoken on the issue, while former chief Rahul Gandhi reacted to the arrest only after 10 days, putting out one tweet questioning the intentions of the Yogi Adityanath government.
Priyanka Gandhi, the Congress’ general secretary in-charge of eastern UP, has been tweeting intermittently about Lallu’s arrest, but there has been little action on the ground, with party leaders choosing to use social media and hold press conferences to oppose Lallu’s arrest. They held a sit-in in Lucknow, but that was at the Congress headquarters. Then they held a ‘mashaal juloos’ but chose to stray just a few feet outside the party headquarters.
The party leadership’s silence has caused significant resentment among UP Congress workers and leaders, who alleged that if this treatment was being meted out by the police to Raj Babbar or Pramod Tiwari or even Jitin Prasada, the reaction of the party leadership would have been totally different.
“If it had happened, then surely it would not be a ‘symbolic protest’. When former state president Rita Bahuguna Joshi was arrested in 2009 during Mayawati’s regime, we were all on the streets. A big protest happened at that time,” a Congress leader had told ThePrint on 28 May.
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