Eye on 2019 Polls, PM Modi to Address Farmers' Rally in UP Tomorrow

Lucknow: In his first interaction since raising the Minimum Selling Price (MSP) for kharif crops, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address around 1.25 lakh farmers at the ‘Kisan Sammelan’ in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur district on Saturday.

Chief minister Yogi Adityanath took stock of the preparations for the rally that will be held at the Roza Railways Ground.

Speaking to News18, BJP’s state vice-president Purshottam Khandelwal said, “Efforts are on to make this grand rally a huge success and our workers from gram panchayat level to block and tehsil level are geared up for it. They will ensure that farmers of the region have no problem while attending the event.” The district administration has prepared parking lots with four helipads for the programme.

After Shahjahanpur, the Prime Minister will visit Lucknow on July 29 to felicitate the cities that have performed well under the government’s welfare schemes. He will also launch the projects that were signed during the Investors’ Summit in February this year.

Modi has been on a whirlwind tour of the state in a bid to garner support ahead of the 2019 election. He had visited Sant Kabirnagar on June 28, Noida on July 9 and Azamgarh, Varanasi and Mirzapur on July 14 and 15.

A day before Modi’s meeting, the Congress and the BJP sparred in Uttar Pradesh, with the opposition party alleging that the saffron party was “nervous”. The BJP, however, dismissed the claims, saying “fear had crept in the leaders of opposition parties”.

Uttar Pradesh Congress spokesperson Ashok Singh claimed that as the 2019 general elections were approaching, the BJP was again resorting to gimmicks to woo farmers. “Whether it is the farmers of Bundelkhand, western Uttar Pradesh or Purvanchal, the way in which their loans were waived is an insult to them and their hard work,” he said.

Singh alleged that no concrete development work had been carried out in any field in the last four years and that was why the people of Uttar Pradesh and India wanted to get rid of the BJP.

Reacting to the charges, UP agriculture minister Surya Pratap Shahi said, “Those who are objecting to the Prime Minister’s visit represent an anti-development mindset, hence they are levelling such baseless allegations.”

(With PTI inputs)