Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav finished his travel on the newly-inaugurated 341 km Purvanchal Expressway at 4.30 am on Thursday as a “symbolic reiteration” that the project was that of his previous government.
Around midnight, he tweeted pictures of his vehicle and supporters saying: “But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep…” Hours later, he tweeted again that night brings in a new dawn. “Now will be a new morning, there will be a change in 2022 (assembly polls).”
The fourth leg of Yadav’s Vijay Yatra began at the zero point of the expressway in Ghazipur’s Haiderya around 11 am on Wednesday. It ended at the Chanda Sarai village in Lucknow at 4 am on Thursday. “I think this is one of the longest Yatras of Samajwadi (SP)… but in a real sense, I think the yatra has not ended…It will go on and stop when the SP government is back.”
Originally, the yatra was to end in Lucknow on Wednesday evening. “But due to many unscheduled halts because of the crowds of supporters along the way, the yatra went on all night,” said SP leader Rajendra Chaudhary.
Yadav undertook the expressway yatra the morning after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it at an emergency airstrip of the Indian Air Force in Sultanpur on Tuesday. On Tuesday, SP workers did a “symbolic inauguration” of the expressway calling it Samajwadi Purvanchal Expressway.
Yadav has maintained the expressway was his previous SP government’s project which the BJP has appropriated.
The fourth leg of Vijay Yatra was originally scheduled from Ghazipur to Azamgarh on Tuesday. But the Ghazipur district administration denied permission for it citing security reasons for Modi’s event.
Yadav said the expressway is incomplete at the start of his Vijay Yatra on the Purvanchal Expressway. “Samajwadis saw the dream and conceived the plan to build it to cut the travel time between Ghazipur and New Delhi. It was to be an expressway to prosperity. They could not make a better road than this in the entire country. After the SP government comes to power, it will build mandis along the expressway and take the expressway to Ballia and connect it with Bihar.”
Political analyst SK Dwivedi said it is high time that political parties shelve identify politics. “They should do development politics. They should not fight over who made what. The expressway was built and it is a good thing for the state, the country, and its people. Credit should be given to both who conceived it, and those who built it.”
SP sees Yadav’s yatras as a lucky charm. “Before this Akhilesh went on a statewide Kranti Rath in 2011 and the party returned to power with full majority and he became the chief minister for the first time. It is going to happen again now,” said Chaudhary.