Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that she has been admitted to hospital due to an illness and hence would not join the party’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra on Friday. She sent her best wishes to her brother Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders for the Nyay Yatra and said she would join them as soon as she felt better.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was supposed to join her brother at Chandauli in Uttar Pradesh after the Yatra entered the state from Bihar, sources said. “I was eagerly waiting for the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra to reach Uttar Pradesh. But due to an illness, I had to be admitted to the hospital today itself. I will join the Yatra as soon as I feel better. Till then, I give my best wishes to all the Yatris -- my dear brother and my colleagues from Uttar Pradesh, who are diligently preparing for the journey -- reaching Chandauli-Banaras,” Vadra said in a social media post.
Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi is leading the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Manipur to Mumbai. The Yatra is currently passing through Bihar. Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a mega rally in Bihar’s Aurangabad on Thursday.
On Friday evening, the Yatra reached Uttar Pradesh, the key Hindi heartland state that sends the maximum number of MPs to the Lok Sabha. It will traverse through the state from February 16 to 21 and then again from February 24 to 25. According to the Congress, February 22 and 23 are rest days for the Yatra.
The East-West Manipur-Mumbai Yatra traverses 6,700 km through 15 states and aims to highlight the message of “nyay” (justice) while meeting common people on the way.
Rahul in his public address during his Bihar leg of the yatra charged the Narendra Modi government with having brought the ‘Agniveer’ scheme in order to spend the defence budget for the benefit of a big business house, instead of emoluments paid to the soldiers. Rahul made the allegation at Mohania in Kaimur district of Bihar, bordering Uttar Pradesh, a region from where youngsters are known to enrol in the armed forces on a large scale.
Earlier in the day, Rahul said his party will accept long-pending demands of farmers in the country and ensure a legal guarantee to minimum support price (MSP) of crops if the INDIA bloc comes to power after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Addressing the ‘Kisan Nyay Panchayat’, a gathering of farmers, in Bihar’s Rohtas, as part of his ‘Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’, he claimed that “cultivators are not getting the remunerative prices for their crops”.
His comment comes at a time when Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), a farmers’ body, called for ‘Bharat Bandh’ on Friday to press the BJP-led central government to accept cultivators’ demands, including a legal guarantee of minimum support price for crops.