The Aam Aadmi Party lashed out at the Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday after Union Home Minister Amit Shah criticised the condition of public schools in the national Capital run. Last week, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had invited Shah to inspect the schools.
Shah shared a video clip of BJP MPs’ visits to some of these schools. “Arvind Kejriwal ji, you called me to see a school run by the Delhi government,” Shah tweeted in the morning. “Yesterday, the eight MPs of Delhi BJP went to different schools. See what their conditions are...The situation in the schools has exposed the claims of your ‘educational revolution’. Now you have to answer to the people of Delhi.”
The saffron party’s Delhi unit chief Manoj Tiwari challenged Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who also holds the education portfolio, to visit the schools along with him and the media. Tiwari said the BJP leaders’ visit had raised questions about Delhi government’s claims of having improved the quality of the schools.
On Monday, Bharatiya Janata Party MP Gautam Gambhir had tweeted a video of a school, saying: “They say fight the election on education, I say fight the election on truth!”
Hours after Shah’s tweet, the Aam Aadmi Party held a press conference in which Sisodia rebutted Gambhir’s allegations. The deputy chief minister said the school in the video had been shifted to another area. “Gautam Gambhir was so busy eating jalebis that he did not read the notice outside the school which clearly says ‘This school has shifted to SBV JJ Colony’,” the party tweeted.
Kejriwal dismissed the BJP report, and accused the party of trying to mislead people by making videos of schools that were not functional. He added that the “education revolution” in Delhi was achieved due to the hard work of 16 lakh children, their parents, and 65,000 teachers. “You insult their hard work every day,” the AAP leader tweeted. “Why do you hate the people of Delhi so much?”
The chief minister said he was hurt as Shah had mocked Delhi’s education system. However, he added that he was happy that the home minister had sent his party leaders to “find fault with Delhi’s schools”, News18 reported. The Aam Aadmi Party said the saffron party had found problems in only eight of the 1,024 government-run schools in the city.
The Kejriwal-led party also accused BJP parliamentarian Hans Raj Hans of threatening an estate manager to open a room so that a similar video on the state of schools could be shot. Hans has denied the allegation.
Delhi will vote on February 8 and the results will be declared three days later.
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