Having received support of the Dalit community in the recently held Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the ruling BJP has asked Union and state ministers, MPs and MLAs to attend local events on Ambedkar Jayanti on Thursday in all districts of the state for taking forward the “mission of BR Ambedkar”.
These events would include public seminars, cleaning and garlanding of Ambedkar statues in what the party says is an attempt to “give due respect to the Dalit ideologue and places associated with him”.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is scheduled to attend the event at Ambedkar Mahasabha in Lucknow. The party in its 2022 poll manifesto had promised a cultural centre after Ambedkar if was voted back to power.
Union Minister of State for Urban Development Kaushal Kishore, who was in Lucknow on Tuesday, said he will attend a seminar organised by Parakh Mahasangh, which he heads. The topic of the seminar will be “the role of the BJP and the RSS in taking forward Ambedkar’s mission, he said.
Kishore said, “The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has only fooled people in the name of Ambedkar and hardly did anything to take forward his mission. It is actually the BJP and the RSS which worked in that direction.”
Kishore, who is Lok Sabha MP from the Mohanlalganj constituency, said he has been assigned Sitapur district by the party for the event.
On topics at the seminars, party’s state vice-president Vijay Bahadur Pathak said it will up to the district units to take a call on that but discussions would be around Ambedkar’s ideology and the places he was associated with him.
Recently, BJP’s minister of state (independent charge) Kapil Dev Agrawal had written a letter to the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to rename engineering colleges after Ambedkar to pay tributes to him.
In the letter, Aggrawal urged the chief minister to restore the names of two engineering colleges in Banda and Bijnore districts after Dr BR Ambedkar.
He also urged him to rename two other engineering colleges in Azamgarh and Ambedkarnagar after the Dalit icon on Ambedkar Jayanti. Notably, the four engineering colleges were established between 2010-2011 during the rule of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati.
“During one of my visits tothe Bijnore district, I got to know that the engineering college there was initially named after BR Ambedkar but its name was changed during the previous Samajwadi Party government. I feel that these icons should not be associated with any caste and thus I decided to request Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to restore the names of these engineering colleges as a tribute to Dr BR Ambedkar on his birth anniversary on April 14,” Aggrawal had told The Indian Express.
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