"Congress tried to strangulate Constitution, people have not forgotten Emergency": UP CM Yogi Adityanath

Countering the allegations made by Congress that the Bharatiya Janata Party will alter the Constitution after coming into power, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday said that it is BJP which has always respected and believed in the "idea of Ambedkar's constitution" and Congress in the past has repeatedly tried to strangulate the Constitution.

Countering the allegations made by Congress that the Bharatiya Janata Party will alter the Constitution after coming into power, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday said that it is BJP, which has always respected and believed in the "idea of Ambedkar's constitution" and Congress in the past has repeatedly tried to strangulate the Constitution. "There cannot be a bigger lie than this. People are aware of the history of the Congress and INDI alliance. It is Congress that tried to strangulate the Constitution after its implementation in 1950. Multiple times it tried to curtail the freedom of expression. It always cared about power. People have not forgotten the time of emergency, he said, adding "Even during UPA, they tried to give away reservations meant for backward classes to minorities under the pretext of the report of Sachar and Ranganath committee," Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath told ANI.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said that the BJP has always respected the constitution laid down by BR Ambedkar. "For BJP, our constitution is supreme. We are committed to the vision and ideals laid down by Baba Saheb Ambedkar," he said.

He further said that workers in the Congress party are not even trusting their own leadership. "You must be seeing that their people are continuously leaving the field. At some places, their state president is resigning and at some places their declared candidates are themselves withdrawing their candidature and joining the BJP and at some places, they are deliberately filling out the nomination papers incompletely," CM Yogi said.

On Monday, showing a copy of the Constitution, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that the BJP if returned to power will attempt to rewrite the Constitution and do away with the reservation, adding that the Congress party is striving to save the Constitution. At a public meeting in Chhattisgarh's Bilaspur, Rahul Gandhi said, "These elections are not ordinary elections. There is a fight between ideologies. On one side, there is the Congress party, the INDIA bloc and on the other side, there is the BJP. And the people who knew politics...And there are crores of people in Hindustan who know that this election is about saving the Constitution."

Earlier, former Union Minister and BJP MP Anantkumar Hegde said that his party needs a total of 400 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls if any changes are to be made in the Constitution. Hegde called for re-writing of the Constitution stating that Congress earlier made changes to the Constitution to oppress the Hindu society and to undo that "act" his party needs a two-thirds majority in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha as well as in states.

The opposition leaders have been accusing the BJP of doing away with the reservation and attempting to rewrite the Constitution. The BJP has denied all the charges. (ANI)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)