The Congress's offer of buses for migrants has been further decried by the Yogi Adityanath government with the allegation that the party is circulating videos of buses of the transport department from Rajasthan and claiming them to be private buses it had organised.
“Where was the party when students from Kota had to be called back," asked Uttar Pradesh deputy CM Dinesh Sharma in an interaction with the media. This was in reference to the state’s evacuation of students from the city in Rajasthan, famous for its coaching institutions that teach students how to crack the IIT engineering admission exams. On April 17, the UP government had sent buses to get back 630 students from Kota in the Congress-ruled Rajasthan. “The Rajasthan CM had also praised the state government,” said Sharma in reference to the move that had drawn some criticism then for not making similar arrangements for laborers stranded in other states.
On Wednesday, the state government released records from its cross-verification of the status of the vehicles offered by the Congress. Among the 1,000 buses (most of them with registration numbers belonging to Rajasthan), 98 are three-wheelers and ambulances, 77 do not have a fitness certificate and a valid insurance, 140 are without a valid insurance, while 77 do not have a fitness certificate issued by the road transport authorities. There are no records available for 68 vehicles on the list provided by the Congress.
The numbers of the vehicles were cross-checked against the database of the NIC by the state’s traffic police and the transport office. On Tuesday, the office of Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said the Uttar Pradesh government has demanded that the 1,000 buses the party wants to ply for ferrying migrant labourers back to the state be handed over in Lucknow. Both the parties have been involved in intense politics over the movement of migrants.
The Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati also sent out a series of tweets dubbing as "extremely unfortunate" the politics that the Congress and the state’s ruling BJP had played on the issue of the return of migrant labourers. She also suggested that the Congress would be better off without insisting on sending workers back home in buses that it had arranged for and should get them railway tickets. She also suggested that the party should focus on pressing the buses into the service of migrants stranded in states ruled by it.
