Over 100 hoardings have come up across Delhi over the past one week carrying pictures of Yogi Adityanath and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and extolling the Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s alleged achievements, the unusual development evoking surprise.

“What are these posters doing in Delhi and that also in such huge numbers? Never seen any other state CM from outside Delhi peeping from the billboards this way,” S. Irfan Habib, a historian of science, tweeted on Tuesday.

Officials of the Uttar Pradesh information and publicity department, which put up the hoardings, declined to comment.

The billboards come weeks after Adityanath was summoned to Delhi in late June to meet Modi, home minister Amit Shah and BJP president J.P. Nadda amid speculation that he might be removed as chief minister.

There was talk of his “autocratic functioning” triggering dissidence within the state unit and his Covid mismanagement partly fuelling international criticism of the Prime Minister. Party sources said the chief minister was told to get his act together before the Assembly polls, due in March next year.

The hoardings show a large image of Modi and a smaller one of Adityanath. Some of them claim that Uttar Pradesh is “number 1” in the country in the development of smart cities and highlights an award conferred on the state by the Union housing and urban affairs ministry.

The rest say the state is “number 1” because it has given 4 lakh government jobs to youths.

Similar hoardings have been reported from Bangalore too. A lawyer, Shishira Rudrappa, had on Tuesday tweeted a picture of a hoarding featuring Modi and Adityanath and making the four lakh jobs claim in Hindi — unusual in a city where hoardings are written in English or Kannada. It had been put up on the way to the airport, he said.

Shortly afterwards, Shishir Singh, the director of the Uttar Pradesh information and publicity department, tweeted tagging Rudrappa: “Be responsible. Don’t spread fake news please. No such advertisement given anywhere in the state of Karnataka.”

To this Rudrappa responded: “Mr Shishir ji, What fake news is this? I just put a picture of a hoarding you have put all over Bangalore Airport! Anyone can see this!”

Rudrappa later posted a video clip of the hoarding being removed by two workers. “Now the hoarding is being removed! Luckily managed to capture on video by my team!” he wrote.

Shishir had his phone switched off on Wednesday afternoon. He didn’t respond to a WhatsApp message this newspaper sent him in the morning. Navneet Sehgal, additional chief secretary of the department, didn’t reply to a message.

But a source in the department said: “We had received an order from the chief minister in 2020 to put up his banners in Delhi along with his and Modi’s pictures. We were asked last month to do this more aggressively.”

In 2020, a few hoardings had been put up near a few Delhi Metro stations.

Adityanath is believed to have nursed prime ministerial ambitions since securing the chief minister’s chair out of the blue in March 2017.

When his father Anand Singh Bisht claimed in Pauri Garhwal on August 11 that year that “my son will become Prime Minister in 2024”, Adityanath didn’t issue the expected disclaimer.

‘Fake ads’

Yuva Halla Bol, “a nationwide movement against unemployment” conducted largely by youths from New Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, dubbed the billboards “fake advertisements” in a media release from Rishav Rajan, its spokesperson.

“We had launched a Berozgar Divas (Jobless Day) campaign on Adityanath’s birthday (June 5) because his government didn’t create any jobs in four years,” Rishav told this newspaper over the phone.

He cited how would-be schoolteachers were agitating in Uttar Pradesh with the results of recruitment exams — for 50,000 jobs — unpublished after three years.

Dwijendra Tripathi, a Congress leader, said: “Out of the 10 smart cities in Uttar Pradesh, none has a proper sewerage. Many areas of Varanasi, publicised as a smart city, are waterlogged even today.”

Saurabh Singh, a social worker in Varanasi, said: “They are removing slums and displacing poor people in Varanasi to make the city look smart, but they are not giving it proper roads or sewer lines.”

Additional reporting by K.M. Rakesh from Bangalore