Lucknow: After calling Uttar Pradesh bypolls defeat ‘a result of BJP’s overconfidence’, Yogi Adityanath on Saturday said that his party has a strategy to challenge the alliance of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in 2019 parliamentary elections.
Speaking at the News18 network’s Rising India summit in New Delhi, he said that his party has a plan if the two rivals form an alliance for 2019. “We have a strategy in place to contest against SP and BSP together. These plans are not made public, but are executed,” he said. The UP CM also asserted that the BJP will win 80 seats in the Lok Sabha polls. “These parties have been in power in the past, but today nobody can alone face the BJP. They cannot even decide who will be the leader of the coalition,” Adityanath added.
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He said that the BJP lost bypolls in Gorakhpur and Phulpur as party workers were complacent and stayed home. “People became overconfident that these seats will be won by us because they were represented by the chief minister, deputy chief minister,” he said.
“There is a difference between secular and irreligious. We should make that distinction. The government must be secular, not irreligious. If secularism means not taking sides, there is nobody more secular than Hindus. Today’s secularists have turned secularism to mean abusing India’s traditions,” he said.
He also criticised the Congress party for calling BJP’s strategies ‘Drama tactics’ and said “They think it is all drama because for 10 years between 2004 and 2014 they had been doing only drama.”