NEW DELHI – The Yogi Adityanath government in the northern Uttar Pradesh state Friday detained Indian National Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra when she was on her way to a village where 10 people were killed in a shootout this week over a land dispute.
The Congress general secretary had landed Friday morning at Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where she went to a hospital to see those wounded in the Sonbhadra massacre.
After meeting the victims, she was scheduled to go to Sonbhadra but Priyanka, 47, was stopped in Mirazapur, following which she staged sat on the road and protested until she was taken away in a government car to a guest house.
“I want to peacefully meet the family members of the victims who had fallen to the bullets in the clash. I want to see the orders under which I have been stopped to meet them,” Priyanka Gandhi was quoted by India Today as saying.
Her brother and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the arrest was an arbitrary use of power by the Yogi Adityanath government.