Crimes on the rise even as as Yogi invites investors to invest in UP

When Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was patting his own back for organising the ‘Investors Meet’, where he claimed investors were making a beeline to invest in Uttar Pradesh because he was able to restore law and order, an 18-year-old girl was burnt alive in Unnao – just 40 kms from Lucknow.

The girl was on her way to the market to purchase groceries on her bicycle, when a few unidentified people poured petrol on her and set her ablaze. On hearing her screams and shrieks, her brother ran after her but by then she was severely burnt and died before she was taken to hospital.

The same day in Agra, the son of BJP law maker Udai Bhan Singh beat the junior engineer of Nagar Nigam when he tried to pull down an illegal hoarding put up by the MLA’s son. The police refused to intervene and when the situation went out of control, they took the JE to Lohamandi police station. An FIR could be lodged only after senior officials of Nagar Nigam interevened and then the JE was released..

While the two-day investors’ meet was on, a spate of criminal incidents rocked the state. The incidents highlight how fragile the law and order situation is in the state. The Yogi Government had tried to project a picture of crime-free state and used a section of media to brush these incidents under the carpet.

BSP national president Mayawati, in a statement on Friday, said that such incidents will not help the Investors’ Meet. “It has become a fashion under the Bharatiya Janata Party governments to waste public money on such investors' meet even though the returns have been abysmal in the past. The entire exercise was to deflect public attention from more serious and pertinent issues like poor law and order, inflation, price rise, and unemployment,” she said.

Mayawati claimed that private investors were unlikely to come to the state with their money due to poor law and order.

She is not off the mark. According to National Crime Records Bureau data, Uttar Pradesh accounted for 9.5 per cent of total crimes reported in the country in 2016. UP reported 14.5 per cent (49,262 out of 3,38,954 cases) of total cases of crimes against women.

With inputs from IANS