Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday appeared to suggest that Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav appeared to have handed over the state to the mafia when he was in power between 2012 and 2017.

“Babua didn’t come out of his house those days. He would wake up at noon. The mafia used to target people and he had allowed them to run a parallel government,” Adityanath, who has earned the monicker of “Bulldozer Baba” for his demolition drive, said at a rally in Milkipur, Ayodhya, on Thursday.

It was his fourth visit to the constituency in the last two months.

The Election Commission is soon expected to announce bypolls to 10 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, including Milkipur. It had fallen vacant after the election of SP’s Awadhesh Prasad from the Ayodhya Lok Sabha seat in June this year. The Opposition parties consider the BJP’s loss in Ayodhya as the most visible evidence of its “growing unpopularity”.

The BJP started calling Akhilesh Babua after his party allied with the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party in the 2019 parliamentary elections. Since Akhilesh would address Mayawati as bua (auntie), the BJP would call it a “Bua-Babua jodi”.

Adityanath continued: “Muslim appeasement had crossed all limits (between 2012 and 2017). They used to prevent Holi, Dipawali, Raksha Bandhan and Shivaratri celebrations.”

“Even today, SP leaders remember those days when they used to encroach on others’ lands. But my government formed an anti-land-mafia force and freed 64,000 hectares from their illegal possession. It is obvious the gang leader would be unhappy and blame the government for the land scam in Ayodhya,” Adityanath said.