LUCKNOW: As the post-operative pain of the people fails to subside even a month after demonetisation, the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh appears to have found an opportunity to harness the common man’s agony to its advantage in the poll-bound state.
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s latest move to extend financial assistance to those who lost their lives due to reasons linked to demonetisation is a clever move to put the Centre in the dock and present himself as a benevolent ruler who has promptly applied balm on the wounds inflicted by a “callous” NDA government.
In the beginning, while the entire country—made to believe that Modi’s masterstroke would fell hoarders of black money—was gung-ho about the move, Akhilesh was cautious. But as people’s anger spilled onto the roads, he got more vocal and aggressive to pin-prick the bubble of euphoria Team Modi was seeking to create.
Uttar Pradesh was the first state to recognise ‘demonetisation’ deaths and to extend financial assistance to such ‘victims’. It started with Aligarh’s Razia, who allegedly committed suicide after being turned away by her bank several times when she went to exchange her demonetised currency. Akhilesh announced `5 lakh compensation for Razia’s family and `2 lakh each to all those who lost their lives due to demonetisation.
The BJP called it opportunist. “Akhilesh’s government does politics of compensation. Here compensations are given for political gains and not to serve the needy. This government didn’t recognise the death of farmers due to drought. It should pay compensation to them too,” says Vijay Bahadur Pathak, secretary, state BJP.
Congress’s Satyadev Tripathi calls it a good gesture, though with a political intent.
The notebandi impact has also helped the SP government divert people’s attention from the raging feud in its first family. At a time when the SP was plagued with intense infighting in the Yadav family, currency scrapping came as a real succour to the ‘beleaguered’ chief minister who, embroiled in a tug of war, was in the need of a tool to divert people’s attention to some more impelling issue.