The Gandhi scion made a visit to the state without any Special security, due to which the Mayawati government has decided to file an official complaint against him to the central government.
Senior UP police officials have said that they will raise the issue with the SPG as the current location of Rahul's cavalcade is not known.
For once, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi kept everyone guessing about what he was up to. It took the authorities more than six hours to put together all the information that had trickled in bits and pieces about Rahul’s Wednesday evening hush-hush visit to the state.
Though on the face of it, the secrecy behind his visit was being seen as an SPG move in the wake of the recent attack on the Shatabdi Express train in Haryana in which Rahul was travelling, the babus in UP saw much more to it for obvious reasons. After all he has been playing a backward and Dalit messiah to the hilt, much to the chagrin of chief minister Mayawati.
It all started around 3 pm when some eye-witnesses saw Rahul Gandhi step out of Indian Airlines flight Number 204 at Amausi Airport. In the absence of the usual slogan-shouting supporters and posse of cops at every nook and corner of the premises, apart from the other security paraphernalia, it took the onlookers sometime to accept that it was actually Rahul Gandhi himself.
“Everything was so unlike a political leader’s visit that we too were not sure if it was him or someone resembling him,” said an eye-witness. Within minutes of his arrival, Rahul was speeding through the VIP Road towards the city in a fleet of SUVs. While Rahul was seated in an Innova, his SPG entourage followed him in three other SUVs.
Rahul’s first known stoppage was around 4 pm at the Ram Nagar crossing in Barabanki district barely 35 kilometres from the state capital. He was seen interacting with some villagers before fleet rolled on. Next, he was spotted in Bahraich around 7:30 pm. After a brief halt and some interaction with villagers by the roadside, his motorcade left for Munshiganj.
When the final picture emerged, it was revealed that the young Gandhi’s clandestine visit was for having a first-hand account of the status of Priyadarshini - a self-help group scheme that was his own brainchild and introduced in 2002. Initially limited to Rae Bareli and Sultanpur - the traditional Congress belt in Uttar Pradesh, the scheme was recently extended to 10 other districts including some in Bundelkhand region and the rest in Eastern UP including Shravasti and Bahraich.
