Hans News Service Lucknow

SP president Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday took a swipe at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over his remarks on the SIR and his ‘80:20’ formulation for the upcoming Assembly polls, suggesting that the BJP-led NDA would be capable of contesting only 80 seats in the state.

In a post on X, Yadav reacted to a recent television interview of Adityanath in which he said the CM claimed that 1.27 crore Hindu voters were missing from the electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise and that the number of Muslim voters had increased by 1.65 per cent.

Sharing a clip of the interview, Yadav challenged Adityanath to repost one of his earlier posts from his official social media account if he genuinely believed that 1.27 crore votes had been deleted.

“Only the wearer best knows when the shoe pinches,” Yadav wrote, invoking a Hindi proverb to suggest that the CM was now experiencing the concerns that the opposition had been raising over the voter revision exercise.

Taking a further swipe at Adityanath, he said, “What is the difference between you and us now, neither in the complaints nor in the sorrows that you and we share.”

In the interview, Adityanath had claimed that around 55 lakh Hindu beneficiaries of government welfare schemes and 4.5 lakh voters in the 18-19 age group were among those whose names were missing from the electoral rolls. He also said that the number of Muslim voters had increased by 1.65 per cent after the SIR.

In another post on X earlier in the day, Yadav responded to Adityanath’s ‘80:20’ remark, saying the CM’s formulation meant that the BJP-led alliance would be capable of contesting only 80 seats, while the PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) alliance would prove to be better than the NDA.