Uttar Pradesh Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu lashed out at Governor Anandiben Patel, accusing her of insulting the Indian Constitution by refusing to meet a party delegation despite giving time to receive a memorandum on Friday.
“It is a black day for the Indian Constitution that a person sitting on a constitutional post gave time to accept a memorandum from Congress and later refused an audience,” Lallu said. A delegation of UP Congress had gone to Raj Bhawan to hand over a memorandum highlighting the BJP government’s failure to handle the second wave of corona and poor vaccination drive while the CM was busy in preparations for the next assembly elections.
Addressing mediapersons along with senior Congress leaders like MLC, Deepak Singh, former minister Naseemudin Siddiqui and others, Lallu attacked Yogi, claiming that the government was happy patting its back just after giving double doses of vaccination to 34 lakh people out of the 22 crore population in Uttar Pradesh.
“UP stands second from the bottom, just ahead of Bihar, in terms of vaccinating the people. But the chief minister and his cabinet colleague are busy making false propaganda that UP is among the top states in vaccination drives to mislead the people of the state,” Lallu alleged.
The UPCC president said that to vaccinate 22 crore people, the state had just 1500 vaccination centers and in rural areas, the residents were faced with problems related to non-availability of internet and other connectivity issues which made uploading documents to the app very cumbersome. “There is only 22 per cent internet connectivity in rural Uttar Pradesh while even in urban areas, only 80 per cent of the population had Internet access. There are a plethora of problems and complaints in the vaccination drive. The government should explain why two vaccines from different companies were being administered to some people,” he said.
Congress leader in UP Legislative Council Deepak Singh said that the complete failure of the Yogi government resulted in deaths of several thousand people in the second corona wave. He added that not only in the health sector, the government failed to provide any relief to the poor by distributing free food grains, financial assistance etc. He alleged that when the people were dying in UP, Yogi was first busy in campaigning in West Bengal and even now, instead of making preparation for the third corona wave, the entire BJP has busied itself in thrashing out ways and means to win the upcoming assembly election in 2022. “For the BJP, winning polls seem to be more important than saving the lives of the people,” Singh said.