Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday made a new announcement on his achievement by changing the name of Faizabad to Ayodhya in a bid to woo Hindu voters ahead of the next year’s Lok Sabha polls.
Delivering his Diwali speech, Adityanath said that Faizabad will now be called as Ayodhya. Adityanath, who has come under immense criticism for focussing only on furthering his Hindutva agenda as the state’s chief minister, had recently changed the name of Allahabad to Prayagraj. His critics say that his aversion to Allahabad and Faizabad are because of they were Muslim sounding names.
Defending his decision, the controversial chief minister had said, “Why are those protesting the change not named Raavan or Duryodhan? Why didn’t their parents name them ‘Raavan’ and ‘Duryodhan’ in that case? In this country, the name holds a lot of significance.”
For the political novice, Adityanath was a firebrand militant Hindutva leader before he became the state’s chief minister last year. One of his achievements was to establish militant Hindutva outfit, Hindu Yuva Vahini, an armed group known for carrying out anti-Muslim vitriolic agenda.
The BJP has shifted its focus to Ram temple after it suffered a setback from the Supreme Court to hear the Ayodhya dispute on an urgent basis, putting paid to the saffron party’s plans to extract its electoral mileage. Rattled by the Supreme Court’s decision coupled with its failure on governance front, the party is now desperate to keep the Hindutva agenda alive as it seeks a second term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
