Covid-hit Villages Are Poll Battleground

On May 22, for the first time ever a chief minis­ter who was not from the Samajwadi Party (SP) vis­ited Saifai, the native vill­age of party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. Yogi Adityanath, the chief min­ister of the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, is the chancellor of the Uttar Pradesh University of Medical Sciences in Saifai in Etawah district.

- Ashish Misra

Visiting the village on the pretext of inspecting the government’s Covid preparations at Saifai University’s 200­ bed L­3 Covid Hospital and the neigh­ bouring Giza village in Saifai block was a considered move. Saifai village is part of Mainpuri, Mulayam’s parliamen­tary constituency, and also a part of the Jaswant Nagar assembly constituency which is represented by his brother and SP rebel leader Shivpal Singh Yadav. So, in a way, Saifai is a focal point of SP politics in Etawah and many adjoin­ ing districts. The BJP, which won the Etawah parliamentary constituency in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elec­tions, did quite poorly in the panchayat elections held in April. The ruling party could win only one of the 24 district panchayat member seats in Etawah. The SP and Shivpal Yadav’s Progressive Samajwadi Party (Lohia) contested the local election together and won 20 of the 24 seats in Etawah.

The panchayat election results, naturally, set off alarm bells in the BJP. Yogi had come to Etawah twice in the last four years, but he had consciously avoided visiting Saifai. This visit, then, was an attempt to retrieve lost ground after the loss in the panchayat elections. Yogi ordered the completion of work on the oxygen plant at Saifai University in two weeks, and told officials to trace Covid victims in the region and provide them immediate treatment through the monitoring committees in the villages. Some 89,512 villages in UP now have active monitoring commit­ tees. Due to their efforts, Covid patients have been detected in 28,742 villages. Government statistics suggest that a third of UP’s villages have been affected by the Covid virus.