Allahabad: Unfazed by allegations that BJP was playing communal card, party chief Amit Shah on Tuesday promised to put an end to illegal slaughter houses if voted to power and “liberate" Uttar Pradesh from “fear of" people like Atiq Ahmed and Mukhtar Ansari.

Shah, who addressed rallies and held a roadshow in the district having the highest number of 12 assembly seats in the state, came down heavily on Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for “offering political patronage" to those with criminal antecedents. “Only the BJP can liberate the people of UP from the fear of people like Atiq Ahmed, Mukhtar Ansari and Afzal Ansari", he said.

Ahmed is in SP and the other two with BSP. Mukhtar Ansari is facing trial in 2005 murder case of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai. BJP will shut down all the mechanical slaughter houses across the state “so that UP is known not for shedding the blood of hapless animals but as a land where streams of milk and butter flowed", he said.

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There have been allegations from rival parties that BJP is trying to polarise voters after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at a Fatehpur rally on Sunday, said each village needs to have a graveyard and a cremation ground and the people should get power on Diwali as well as Eid without discrimination.

They allege that the issue of mechanical slaughter houses is being raised for similar motive. On the last day of campaigning for the fourth phase, Shah on Tuesday started off with a rally in Soraon in trans-Ganga region where he urged voters to support the candidate of ally Apna Dal.

Apna Dal has influence among the Kurmi caste that has a sizeable population in Awadh and Purvanchal regions. Shah, thereafter, arrived in the city and addressed a public meeting in support of party national secretary Siddharth Nath Singh, the BJP candidate from Allahabad (West), before embarking on a road show criss-crossing a major part of the city.

“Siddharth is my dear friend who has been doing a great job in Delhi. “We asked him to fight elections from Allahabad as this is the land of his maternal grandfather Lal Bahadur Shastri and the ongoing assembly polls are going to be historic and path-breaking," the BJP president said.

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Singh’s candidature had surprised many local BJP leaders and the Delhi-based leader has been working hard to cast aside the “outsider" tag. He has been fielded from a constituency where his party has not been a force to reckon with so far. “The state has been ruled alternately by Samajwadi Party and BSP for the past one decade. It has become obvious that neither of these two parties can get rid of lawlessness, nepotism and corruption.

“These parties can never solve the pressing problem of unemployment," Shah said. “The BJP can and will solve these pressing problems which people of UP have been facing. “I have travelled across the length and breadth of this large state and there is an unmistakable wave in favour of change everywhere," Shah, who was also the party’s national general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, claimed.

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