BJP today lambasted the Samajwadi Party-Congress tie-up as an "unnatural, artificial and opportunistic" alliance and said that a "cyclone of change" was sweeping in its favour across Uttar Pradesh.
"The Congress has suddenly discovered virtues in Akhilesh Yadav. We wonder what happened to Rahul Gandhi's 'khat sabhas' and slogans like '27 saal, UP behaal'. Does the Congress vice-president now disown his criticism of the SP's misrule in UP?" asked BJP leader and Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
"We also wonder whether Akhilesh Yadav has learnt anything from the track record of the Congress which has belittled even its own leaders if they happened to be outside the Nehru-Gandhi family. One only has to look at examples of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Narasimha Rao and V P Singh.
"In the recent past too, an ordinance brought by Manmohan Singh was torn and thrown away by Rahul in full public view and termed as nonsense," he said.
"Besides, both Chaudhary Charan Singh and Chandrashekhar were ditched by the Congress when they formed a government at the Centre with the party's support," he said.
Mocking Yadav's claims of having brought good governance to UP, Prasad said, "He brags about efforts to make the state's police as efficient as that of New York while his minister Gayatri Prajapati is accused of rape and the poor victim is forced to knock the doors of the Supreme Court just to get an FIR lodged. Another party MLA Arun Verma has also been booked for raping and murdering a woman."
"Lawlessness in the state is preventing entrepreneurs from investing in UP. Scores of mobile phone manufacturing units have come up in the country since Narendra Modi took over as the Prime Minister.
Some of these have been set up in Greater Noida and Noida adjoining Delhi. But no industrialist can risk going further," the Union Minister, who holds Electronics, Information Technology and Law and Justice portfolios, said.
"The people of UP have lost faith in these two parties which have formed an unnatural, artificial and opportunistic alliance out of sheer desperation. They are also fed up with the BSP as they can not forget Mayawati's rampant corruption and selective approach towards crime control," Prasad said.
"We have credible feedback, based on the three phases of polls so far held in the state, which suggests that what UP is witnessing a cyclone, not just a wind of change. They are looking at BJP with hope," he said.
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