Babua who wakes up at noon: Yogi Adityanath swipes at Akhilesh Yadav, he hits back
India Today
At a Lucknow scholarship event, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath mocked Akhilesh Yadav for "waking at noon" over education failures, triggering a sharp counterattack from the Samajwadi Party chief on X.
A war of words broke out in Uttar Pradesh after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath took a sharp jibe at Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav during a scholarship distribution programme in Lucknow, prompting an equally caustic response from the former Chief Minister.
Addressing students at the Indira Gandhi Pratishthan, Yogi Adityanath, without naming Akhilesh Yadav, mocked the previous regime, saying a leader who "wakes up at noon" cannot worry about the poor or the future of education.
"Babua (a name given to Akhilesh by his political opponents) who wakes up at 12 in the afternoon hardly has time to think about the poor. If the head of a state gets up at noon, and you talk to him about sunrise, he will think it's a dream because he has no awareness of the world and no desire to learn," Adityanath said.
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The Chief Minister alleged that during earlier governments, basic education had "turned barren" and secondary education had become a hub for cheating. "A few mafias played with the trust of the youth. Because of nepotism, corruption and negligence, welfare schemes like scholarships failed to reach deserving students," he added.
The Chief Minister praised the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system, saying transparency had ended corruption in scholarship distribution. He announced that for the financial year 2025–26, Rs 944.55 crore had been transferred to the bank accounts of 18,78,726 students across the state.
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