Evening Pulse: Yogi answers the SP with a 'mafia' charge, not the voter list, as BJP courts teachers

By evening, the two sides were talking past each other. The Samajwadi Party (SP) spent Tuesday pushing a paper trail on duplicate voters. The BJP spent it on welfare and on the old charge that the SP shelters criminals, with the 23 October Legislative Council polls as the stage. Neither engaged the other's main argument.

Yogi Adityanath's Bareilly day, which we flagged this morning, closed with two speeches. At the Police Lines ground he formally raised the monthly honorarium of village watchmen, or gram praharis, from Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,500, and added cashless treatment of up to Rs 5 lakh a year for them and their families, ETV Bharat and Amar Ujala reported. ETV Bharat put the number of watchmen at about 68,000, which settles the 60,000-to-70,000 range we noted earlier. He told them to act as the villages' CCTV and pass on what they see to the police. Attacking the SP, he said that before 2017 people in power "used to commit dacoity themselves or instigate others to do so, while the police remained silent," ETV Bharat reported.

The afternoon rally at the Bareilly Club ground backed BJP candidate Hari Singh Dhillon for the Bareilly-Moradabad teachers' seat. Amar Ujala reported that Adityanath alleged the SP's ties ran to mafia, goons and criminals rather than to educated society, and said the government's anti-mafia drive was what troubled the party. He also told a story about a former SP secondary education minister who, he claimed, confused the revolutionary Ram Prasad Bismil with the musician Ustad Bismillah Khan at a Gorakhpur event. He asked teachers to vote on 23 October. In the reports we read, he did not address the SP's vote-roll charges, so the reply we flagged this morning never came. We found no SP response to his remarks by publication time.

His deputy pressed the same line further south. Keshav Prasad Maurya, campaigning in Prayagraj for graduates' seat candidate Ashok Kumar Rathore, claimed the BJP would win all 11 council seats on offer and that the SP would be wiped out in 2027, Aaj Tak reported. At a rally in Kaushambi, UNI reported, he called the SP a party of mafias. These are campaign claims. The teachers' and graduates' seats have small electorates, but they are the last direct contest before the assembly vote.

The SP's side of the ledger has not moved since the afternoon. We found no reply from the Chief Electoral Officer or district officials to its memorandum alleging duplicate entries in about 100 seats, or to the Azamgarh claim. Nor did we find any report that the INDIA bloc petition against the Election Commission, which Akhilesh Yadav signed, has been listed for hearing after the registry's 14 objections.

Rahul Gandhi's legal trouble came closer to home. A special MP-MLA court in Sultanpur has finished hearing the defamation complaint filed by BJP leader Vijay Mishra over remarks Gandhi allegedly made about Amit Shah during the 2018 Karnataka campaign, and will deliver its verdict on 26 October, The Statesman and Deccan Herald reported. Special Magistrate Shubham Verma reserved the order, according to The Statesman. Gandhi's lawyer Kashi Shukla said he would appear in person that day, Aaj Tak reported.

A correction to our afternoon report: Ajay Rai is no longer UP Congress president. Aradhana Misra 'Mona' was appointed to the post on 2 October, with Imran Masood as working president, Jagran English reported, and Sunday's clash at the party office broke out during her takeover event, Aaj Tak reported. The Brijlal Khabri panel examining the clash between Rai's supporters and councillor Mamta Chaudhary's still has a week to report.

In Pilibhit, the Amariya killings have widened into a larger police case. Amar Ujala reported that eight people, including main accused Kaushal Gupta, have been detained over Monday night's firing after a Ramlila committee dispute, which killed brothers Ankit and Mohit Gupta and teenager Kunal Srivastava. Aaj Tak also reported the wider detentions. Police said a forensic team had collected evidence and a heavy force remains in the town. Paddy centres in the waterlogged districts are still due to open on Thursday.