Even as Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav tried to extract political mileage by blaming the BJP for staging an ink attack against its own candidate from Ghosi, Dara Singh Chauhan, it has now come to the fore that the assailant was a member of Samajwadi Party and had pictures with many several senior party leaders.
Ghosi Ink Attack
The Ghosi assembly by-polls campaign took a negative twist on Sunday afternoon, as a young individual splashed ink on Dara Singh Chauhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, in the Adari area of Mau district. Following the assault, the perpetrator managed to flee the scene.
Chauhan blamed Samajwadi Party for the attack. “These people (SP) are capable of anything, much bigger crimes and hence this ink attack is nothing by their standards. This also shows that the SP has read the writings on the wall. The popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.P. chief minister Yogi Adityanath is now making the SP nervous,” he said.
The SP brushed aside the BJP’s accusation. Rajendra Chaudhary, the national secretary and state spokesperson of the Samajwadi Party, suggested, “It’s possible that, for political gain, certain individuals affiliated with the BJP orchestrated the attack.”
SP chief Akhilesh Yadav blames BJP for staging an attack against its candidate
Hours later, a man identifying as Abhimanyu Yadav surrendered himself to the police at the Kopaganj police station for the ink attack. Yadav, however, claimed that he threw ink at the direction of BJP leaders.
Promptly later, Akhilesh Yadav took to Twitter, accusing the BJP of staging an attack against its own candidate.
“When the person who threw ink in Ghosi himself confessed that it was done by the BJP people, then what more to say now? Now look ahead, one can’t what BJP would do in the face of an imminent defeat,” Yadav tweeted.
Assailant Abhimanyu Yadav and his links to Samajwadi Party and leaders
Even as Samajwadi Party and Akhilesh Yadav claimed that the assailant was working at the behest of the BJP, the social media accounts of the accused revealed his connections with the Samajwadi Party. On Facebook, Abhimanyu Yadav mentions in his bio that he works at the Samajwadi Party, puncturing claims that the ink attack against Dara Singh Chauhan was the handiwork of BJP leaders.
Moreover, the profile picture of Abhimanyu Yadav has him shaking hands with Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, along with other party leaders.
Yadav has been actively using social media platforms to campaign for Samajwadi Party leaders and share pictures with them. He also regularly attends party meets and events, as evident from his Facebook profile page.
Recently, on August 4, just a couple of weeks before the ink attack, Abhimanyu shared a reel on Facebook showing Samajwadi Party workers with the party leader Vineet Kushwaha.
The purported Facebook page of Abhimanyu Yadav puts paid to the claims made by him and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav that BJP leaders had engineered an attack against their own leader and how the entire episode may have been a well-thought-out conspiracy to discredit the BJP by getting the assailant surrender before the police and having him blame the saffron party.
