Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Friday targeted Uttar Pradesh’s Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, calling him ‘mohra’ (pawn) of Delhi.
The setback to the Bharatiya Janata Party in recent Lok Sabha elections has caused rumblings within the ruling party and Maurya is perceived to be creating dissidence at the behest of party high command in Delhi.
Maurya hit back by calling SP chief the /mohra’ of the Congress party and suggested that he should save SP from “extinction”.
“The BJP has spoiled every system. Every system and every department has been ruined... I heard that (Keshav Prasad) Mauryaji is a ‘mohra’. He is the password of Delhi's Wi-Fi. Tell me, will the government run like this? UP will not run like this. They have cheated the people of UP,” the SP chief said, addressing a press conference.
Hitting back at Akhilesh Yadav on the ‘mohra’ remark, UP’s Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, in a post on X, called the SP chief the “mohra” of the Congress party.
“The brave SP leader, Akhilesh Yadav, who has become a ‘mohra’ of the Congress, is harbouring misunderstandings about the BJP. Instead of targeting and insulting the most backward sections of society, he should focus on saving SP from extinction,” Maurya posted on X.
He expressed confidence that 2017 state assembly election results will be repeated in 2027 and the ‘Lotus’ will bloom again and the BJP will again form the government.
Reacting to the UP deputy chief minister’s remarks, Akhilesh said that they were the ‘mohra’ of the poor people.
“We are Samajwadi mohra. We are mohra of the poor,” the SP chief said.
Akhilesh Yadav unveiled the ‘Samvidhan Manastambh’ established to house a copy of the Constitution at the SP headquarters in Lucknow on Friday.
Earlier on July 18, in a post on X, the SP chief had announced a “Monsoon Offer” in which he asked dissidents to bring a hundred MLAs and form the government in Uttar Pradesh.
After SP chief and MP Akhilesh Yadav’s “Monsoon Offer” announcement, the UP deputy chief minister called it “Mungerilal ke haseen sapne” (a 1989 TV show on a daydreamer Mungerilal).
In a post on X, the BJP leader said that the public and the karyakartas will “wrap up the Monsoon Offer at 47” in 2027.
“A sinking ship and a dying party whose both present and future are in danger. He may see ‘Mungerilal ke haseen sapne’ but they cannot be fulfilled,” Maurya said in his post.
Earlier, Maurya caused a stir with a post on X from his office that quoted him as saying, “The organisation is bigger than the government; the pain of the workers is my pain. No one is bigger than the organisation; the workers are the pride.”
The post made the opposition speculate that this was a sign of dissent in the BJP. Akhilesh Yadav alleged that the BJP’s fight for power meant it was not thinking about the public.
In the 2017 UP assembly elections, the SP managed to win only 47 seats while the BJP single-handedly won 312 seats with over 40 per cent vote share. The elections to the 403-member UP legislative assembly will be held in 2027.
