Just before the Global Investors' Summit (GIS)-2023 kicks off on Friday, opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh have mounted a blistering attack on the Yogi Adityanath-led state government.
Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav said the state government should not discriminate between industrialists. He described industrialist Gautam Adani as "Vitamin A of the BJP" and added that "excess and loss of Vitamin A has its disadvantages".
"The BJP government is getting MoUs done with the companies that function out of one room. Anyone it spots with suit-and-tie, the BJP government is getting MoU signed with them," the SP chief said.
"Industry and industrialists should progress, but there should not be any discrimination or preferential treatment by the government. It cannot be the case that one industrialist grows and the other does not.
The government should have the same vision for everyone." Meanwhile, the Congress termed the GIS-23 as "Global Event Summit" and alleged that it was being organised to waste public money.
AICC spokesman Akhilesh Pratap Singh said the state government, on the one hand, was claiming to have attracted an investment of Rs 21 lakh crore ahead of the GIS, and on the other hand, it was also spending a huge amount of money in organising it.
Singh said the state government has also engaged certain event management agencies for the summit and now it should clarify about the amount of money it was paying to such agencies.
Responding to the attacks, Uttar Pradesh BJP spokesman Harish Srivastava said: "Akhilesh Yadav seems to have lost the plot completely. He is getting desperate and it shows in his utterances.
The SP must realise that though it is the main opposition party in Uttar Pradesh, it does not mean negating all positives. "There is so much that he could have done for the state during his tenure, but he has a problem if the BJP is doing development at the speed of a bullet train and people are backing the party." The spokesman also said that the Congress was not even worth responding.