BY SHAZIA SALEEM
Samajwadi Party’s president and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav charged the BJP with liquidating Jayaprakash Narayan’s legacy by transferring the Jayaprakash Narayan International Centre (JPNIC) in Gomti Nagar to private ownership for ₹831 crore, recently at a press conference. While talking to media he said, the deal went beyond the sale of a government building: it commercialised a political symbol erected by the previous Samajwadi government and constituted a clear undervaluation of public property.
The building, conceived during the Samajwadi Party’s tenure on roughly 18-20 acres, was designed as a signature public facility: extensive guest rooms, an all-weather heated swimming pool, auditorium, large convention centre, sports courts, gym, restaurants, helipad and secure parking. Yadav put its current market value above ₹6,000 crore and argued that parking revenues alone could have yielded ₹867 crore over thirty years, more than the sale price.
Yadav linked the transaction to earlier disposals of Kisan Bazaar, Shane-Awadh (₹428 crore), portions of Janeshwar Mishra Park and the Plasicio Mall on Shahid Path, asserting a pattern of transferring public assets to “close associates” while the government simultaneously levelled corruption charges against the projects’ original construction. Yadav’s critique operates on two levels. First is political symbolism: the BJP, he recalled, invoked JP’s name and image at its founding to claim continuity with the socialist and anti-Emergency tradition. Selling a centre built to honour that legacy, he argued, exposes the hollowness of that appropriation.
Second is governance: incomplete construction was never finished in a decade, contractors were paid in full without verification and required to sign away the right to litigate, and the same administration that once labelled the project corrupt is now monetising it. Parallel examples, Agra–Lucknow Expressway tolling privatised, alleged irregularities in re-carpeting, and the rapid deterioration of other expressways, were cited as evidence of a broader “pocket-filling model.”
The statement also touched on law-and-order deterioration and expressed condolences for flood deaths in Nepal, but the core remained the JPNIC sale. Whether the numbers Yadav cited withstand independent audit is a separate question; what is clear is that the episode has given the opposition a potent narrative combining heritage, fiscal prudence and class politics, government as shopkeeper, public wealth transferred upward, just as Uttar Pradesh’s political temperature begins to rise again.
He extended warm greetings to the people of the country on the occasion of Raksha Bandhan. In a brief message, he described the festival as far more than a ritual of tying a thread, calling it a lifelong commitment rooted in mutual trust, affection and responsibility. Yadav noted that when sisters tie the rakhi, brothers, in turn, pledge to protect them. He underlined that the day also carries a deeper social resolve, the duty to safeguard the security and dignity of mothers and sisters. The statement, measured and free of partisan rhetoric, focused on the festival’s emotional and ethical core rather than political messaging.
