Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday, 28 January, said that people should vote for the Aam Aadmi Party as they built schools for them and not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Kejriwal was speaking at the Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in Delhi’s New Friends Colony where he, along with Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, laid the foundation stone for 11,000 new classrooms across 250 schools in the national capital. Kejriwal, here, said that people vote for the BJP out of ‘Modi bhakti’.
“If you ask people who they’ll vote for, they say Modiji. If you ask them why, they say because they love Modiji. Now decide whether you love your children or whether you love Modiji. If you love your children, vote for those who are working for your children. And if you don’t love your children, vote for Modiji… Modi has not built a single school for you. You can either do deshbhakti or Modi bhakti. It’s not possible to do both,” he said, as quoted by The Indian Express.
Sisodia also spoke on similar lines.
“Someone told me that they will vote for Modi in the elections…because woh achhe lagte hai…I told them that if you love your children, vote for those who are building schools for them. So I’m telling all parents, and asking all children here to go home and ask their parents whether they love you or not. If they say that they love you, tell them ‘vote for those who are building schools for us’,” IE quoted him as saying.
“Today, go home and say ‘thank you’ to your parents for having voted for Aam Aadmi Party and making Arvindji chief minister and me, the education minister. If they wouldn’t have done it, how would we have worked? I want to thank all the parents sitting at the back for giving us the opportunity for doing this work and we have done it… thank you for giving us the opportunity to work on education,” Sisodia added.
The address was reportedly being streamed live across 700 schools in the national capital.
This is the second phase of infrastructure expansion by the Delhi government after construction of 8,000 new classrooms between 2015 and 2018.
"Building infrastructure isn't rocket science, but the way how confidence has been instilled in the teachers of Delhi government schools, through exposures at the most reputed institutes of the world like Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard," Kejriwal said.as quoted by PTI.
"25 new schools have been built, 31 are under construction and the blue prints for 78 new schools have been decided," Sisodia said at the event.
"We have no illusion that having built the right infrastructure, the work on education is completed. Today, Delhi government schools perform better than even private schools, selections in competitive exams from government schools have gone up from 40-50 to more than 250," he said.
Sisodia said the fact that education was kept away from politics is the reason why the government schools of the country are in such bad state. "It's high time we bring education in the political discourse of the country."
(With inputs from PTI and The Indian Express)
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