After Rahul Gandhi, BJP heavyweights to visit Amethi

BJP president Amit Shah and Union minister Smriti Irani are set to visit Amethi, three days after Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi went there.

Union Minister of Textiles and Information and Broadcasting Smriti Irani is scheduled to arrive on Monday, while BJP chief Amit Shah will visit on October 10, a statement issued by the district administration said.

Both the leaders are likely to announce a number of schemes at Amethi, which also happens to be Rahul Gandhi's parliamentary constituency.

Irani will lay the foundation stones of an FM radio station, two Krishi Vigya Kendras and a dam at Pipri village.

She will then visit a unit of the Steel Authority of India in Jagdishpur, an industrial area in Amethi.

Amethi, which has traditionally been a Congress bastion, had in 2014 Lok Sabha elections witnessed a high-pitched electoral battle between Gandhi and Irani.

Though Irani lost to the Congress scion, she managed to reduce his victory margin from around 3.70 lakh in 2009 to 1.07 lakh in 2014.

In the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, the BJP won six of the 10 Assembly seats falling under the parliamentary constituencies of Amethi and Rae Bareli. Four of them were in Amethi.

Party sources said the upcoming visit of the senior BJP leaders was aimed at sending a clear message that the current regime believed in all-round development of the state and was not meting out any "step-motherly treatment" to the areas where the BJP had failed to make a mark.

The Congress vice president had during his visit here on October 5 accused the BJP governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh of re-inaugurating the projects launched by the previous UPA regime in the district.

He had also mounted a sharp attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and asked him to address unemployment problem and farmers issues, and dared him to allow the Congress to resolve the problems in six months.

OneIndia News (with agency inputs)