Akhilesh Mocks RSS, Backs Tejashwi in Bihar

Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav took a sharp dig at RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s claim that India’s people share “the same DNA for 40,000 years,” during a fiery speech at the Voter Adhikar Yatra rally in Ara, Bhojpur, on Saturday. Joining Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on the yatra’s third leg, Yadav mocked Bhagwat’s remarks made at the RSS centenary event, where he also called everyone in “Akhand Bharat” a Hindu. “We’ve fought social injustice for 5,000 years, but now they say the system is 40,000 years old.

Time to pull up our socks,” Yadav quipped, rallying the crowd to oust the BJP from Bihar’s Magadh region, as they did in Uttar Pradesh’s Awadh during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

Yadav threw his full support behind Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav for the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections, urging voters to back him as the next chief minister. “Tejashwi’s promise of jobs will end forced migration. Let him win, and the BJP will be the ones migrating out of Bihar,” he said, referencing Tejashwi’s campaign focus on employment to curb the state’s labor exodus.

The SP chief also alluded to the 1990 arrest of BJP’s L.K. Advani in Samastipur, which halted the Ram Rath Yatra and deepened the rivalry between RJD’s Lalu Prasad Yadav and SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav, signaling a united front now.

Accusing the Narendra Modi government of intimidating opposition while buckling under U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, Akhilesh remarked, “It’s like tariffs were slapped on BJP’s mouths.” He criticized the BJP’s unfulfilled promise to double farmers’ incomes, claiming, “Farmers are ruined instead.” 

Yadav also alleged Election Commission of India (ECI) manipulation in favor of the BJP, vowing that the INDIA bloc would ensure no voter names are wrongfully deleted from electoral rolls and that voting occurs without fear. This follows Tejashwi’s claim on August 2 that his name was missing from the voter list, a charge the ECI refuted, sparking a forgery probe.

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The Voter Adhikar Yatra, covering 1,300 km across 20 Bihar districts, aims to counter alleged voter suppression in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which removed 65 lakh voters. With the Supreme Court set to hear RJD and AIMIM pleas on September 1 to extend the SIR claims deadline, Akhilesh’s rally underscores the INDIA bloc’s strategy to unite Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) and Pichhda-Dalit-Adivasi (PDA) voters, leveraging his Uttar Pradesh success where SP won 37 seats in 2024.

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