UP painted, repainted in political game of colours
LUCKNOW: A political game of colours seems to be going on in Uttar Pradesh, particularly in the state capital Lucknow.
While the issue of UP Haj Committee office’s boundary wall being painted saffron and then getting restored to its original colour was yet to die down, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) and Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) are allegedly engaging in changing and re-changing colours.
The LMC, since Tuesday, painted two of its parks in Gomti Nagar’s Viram Khand and its two heavy fork-lift vehicles (that lift wrongly parked vehicle away) saffron.
The LDA on Thursday began painting, in saffron and yellow, the border pillars of cycle tracks, constructed by the previous Akhilesh Yadav government.
By Saturday evening the LDA managed to cover about 1 km of the tracks. However, in a U-turn on Sunday, these cycle track pillars were being repainted in their original green-red-yellow colours.
While the pillars are going through colour correction, allegedly because of a political backlash from the Samajwadi Party, the parks and the LMC fork-lift vehicles may continue with their changed colours. The original colour of the fork-lifts was ‘navy blue’ or their factory custom colour of yellow.
However, municipal commis- sioner Udairaj Singh said they had nothing to do with the changing colours.
“No directives for painting any park, in any specific colour, has been issued by any official of the LMC. Usually the colour of boundaries of parks is decided by residents and corporators. LMC never interferes in the colour choice,” he said. The official also said that a colour should not be associated with any political party and said that he did not give any instruction for painting LMC fork-lift vehicles saffron.
Chakresh Jain, the LDA in-charge for Gomti Nagar zone where the cycle tracks were painted was not available for comments.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s association with saffron colour is well-known and the state too appeared to have started embracing that .
First Shastri Bhawan, the UP secretariat’s annexe building, was painted in two shades of saffron. Then all the buses of the new Antodaya bus service of UP State Road Transport Corporation (UPSRTC) had saffron as its signature colour. This was followed by the Haj Committee office and then the Kotwali police station.
In December 2017, heads of different villages in Pilibhit, in an apparent bid to please their political seniors, painted 80 of the 1,230 government primary schools saffron.
Later, they were ordered to restore the schools’ original white colour by district magistrate Sheetal Verma.