Last week, during the Opposition’s protests against Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government over Lakhimpur Kheri violence, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi was allowed to travel before being detained in Sitapur while the former chief minister and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav was not allowed to move beyond Lucknow. For the next two days, Priyanka remained the focus with visuals of her sweeping the floors in the detention room and a video urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take action against the guilty streaming on social media and other channels even as other Opposition leaders were also detained and prevented from travelling to the spot, about a two-hour drive from Lucknow. We hear the BJP, and the Yogi Adityanath administration, in particular, were okay with Priyanka Gandhi, and the Congress, stealing the limelight without much focus on Samajwadi Party, the main opposition party in the state going to polls in a few months. Some leaders within the BJP believed that if Priyanka and the Congress stayed in the limelight, the Opposition might as well get divided to the benefit of the ruling BJP. Others believe that the Sikh farmers in the Terai region, comprising Lakhimpur Kheri and Pilibhit districts, will anyway not vote for BJP and hence let the Congress reap the political dividends and not the Samajwadi Party. In the 2017 polls in UP, the SP-Congress alliance failed miserably. SP won only 47 of the 177 seats it contested while the Congress won seven of the 21 seats it contested.
