SP manifesto likely to promise free electricity: Akhilesh

KANPUR: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday promised that consumers may be offered free electricity, if his party was voted to power in next year’s UP assembly elections.

“Electricity will be much cheaper for sure and we may also announce free power to all consumers in the party manifesto,” he said at a public meeting in Kannauj, taking a leaf out of the Aam Admi Party’s (AAP) manifesto.

On his arrival, the SP chief unveiled the statue of former party MLA Kaptan Singh Yadav and addressed a well attended gathering in Gursahaigunj.

After the 2019 LS elections, this was Akhilesh Yadav’s first public meeting in his stronghold. His wife Dimple Yadav had lost to BJP’s Subrat Pathak.

Hitting out at the BJP government, Yadav called it a party of liars, which had failed to protect the rights of farmers. “Women are most unsafe in Uttar Pradesh, which has a dubious distinction of reporting the maximum number of custodial deaths in the country,” he said.

He mentioned the case of Kanpur realtor, Manish Gupta, who was found dead following a police raid at a Gorakhpur hotel where he was staying with two friends from Gurugram, and added that “seers were not safe in UP where they were being murdered.”

Yadav also reiterated his charge that veteran SP leader Azam Khan is being kept in jail in fake cases. “The SP government would withdraw all the cases filed against SP workers and leaders,” added Yadav.

SP state president Naresh Uttam Patel and former MP from Mainpuri Tej Pratap Yadav were with Akhilesh Yadav during the public meeting.

SP chief for caste census in UP

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav also promised to go in for the caste census in Uttar Pradesh, if voted to power.

He made the promise alleging that the BJP-led central government was shy of conducting it, fearing that the caste census in the country will lead to the backward classes of people demanding their rights and due respect after this.

“The BJP government at the Centre does not want to conduct caste census as it knows that backwards will demand their right and due respect after it. This is the biggest demand of backwards and Dalits,” Akhilesh Yadav said in a statement here.