A drone, or drone, said to be being tested by a private company, crashed into an agricultural field in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Saivai on Saturday, sparking panic at a time when the US-Iran war in West Asia is dominating news cycles.
Former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav criticized the BJP government in the state for not providing advance information about such trials to the public.
“People thought it might be some missile that had strayed from the war zone and landed here,” he wrote on X, along with a short video of the drone.
“If this was part of any government test or experiment, the citizens of the state should have been informed and alerted in advance. When there is no certainty whether the drone will fly or not, why take the risk of flying it in a populated area? If it had fallen on a nearby settlement instead of the field, this incident could have caused loss of life and property,” the Samajwadi Party chief added, in his post originally written in Hindi.
He called for an investigation and called on the government “after assessing the economic loss to the farmer’s field and the resulting psychological trauma, to provide the farmer with appropriate compensation.”
He also asked: “Saivai residents say: If BJP members cannot even fly a drone, how will they fly planes from this airstrip in Saivai, whose runway has been deliberately neglected by the BJP without maintenance out of political spite?” Saifai also happens to be his hometown.
What the authorities said
Etawah District Police later responded to his post: “Following information regarding the downing of a prototype drone belonging to a private company in Saifai district during a trial in Nandpur village, parts of the drone have been secured from a safety perspective. There has been no loss of life of any kind, and the current situation is normal.”
“Blame the war for everything”
Earlier, in another statement referring to the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, and the resulting West Asian oil supply crisis, Akhilesh Yadav on Friday alleged that the BJP was blaming the conflict on a host of domestic issues in an attempt to hide policy failure.
“These people may now say that the Ganges has not been cleaned because of the war in West Asia,” he noted.
He also said that the government is diverting attention from farmers’ issues and raising irrelevant matters.
Referring to the fertilizer shortage, he said farmers had to stand in long queues and “now this shortage can be attributed to the Iran-Israel conflict.”
In response to a question related to foreign policy and India’s relations with the United States, Yadav said that he did not wish to comment in detail because his knowledge of the subject was limited, but he noted that the influence of the United States was clear in many areas.
“If one studies the previous speeches of leaders, including opposition leaders, after independence, it will be clear what kind of foreign policy India should have followed and how it has evolved over time,” the leader of the third largest party in Lok Sabha noted.
