Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was stopped when she was on her way to meet Sonbhadra victims . 10 people were killed in a shootout this week over a land dispute there . The Congress general secretary sat on the road and protested until she was taken away in a government car.
Priyanka Gandhi, the Congress in-charge of eastern UP set on a road in Mirzapur near Sonbhadra, surrounded by her security and Congress workers.
“I only want to meet the affected families, whose members have been mercilessly shot dead. A boy of my son’s age was shot at and is lying in hospital. Tell me on what legal basis I have been stopped,” Priyanka Gandhi told .
She landed this morning at Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where she went to a hospital to see those wounded in the Sonbhadra massacre.
Later, as she headed for Sonbhadra 80 km away and stopped by police .. “I am sitting peacefully, can someone please show me the order,” she said at the spot where her convoy was stopped.
As she was being taken away in a government official’s vehicle, she said: “I don’t know where are they taking me, we are ready to go anywhere.”
Rahul Gandhi tweeted this afternoon that the “illegal arrest of Priyanka Gandhi” was “disturbing”. “The illegal arrest of Priyanka in Sonbhadra, UP, is disturbing. This arbitrary application of power, to prevent her from meeting families of the 10 Adivasi farmers brutally gunned down for refusing to vacate their own land, reveals the BJP Govt’s increasing insecurity in UP,
Ten persons were killed and over 24 injured in the shooting on Wednesday over a 36-acre piece of land. A village chief, Yagya Dutt, and his associates fired on a group of tribal farmers who had refused to give up the land they had tilled for generations.
Witnesses said Yagya Dutt had brought nearly 200 men on 32 tractor trolleys to seize the land. After the tribals opposed, the men fired at them for over half-an-hour in one of the most chilling incidents the country has seen in recent times.
