In Varanasi, Modi Recalls Decade-old Late Mulayam’s ‘Boys Will Be Boys' Remark To Corner Opposition

Addressing ‘Nari Shakti Sammelan’ in his Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency, Modi claimed there was "jungle raj" during the Samajwadi Party rule in Uttar Pradesh and women found it difficult to step out of their homes.

He said the "SP people" used to shamelessly say boys make mistakes, in an apparent reference to Yadav's controversial remark made a decade back while opposing capital punishment for rape. "Boys will be boys, they make mistakes", the SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav had then said.

On Tuesday, Modi said, "Let SP's boys make a mistake now." He added Yogi Adityanath government will deal with them in a manner that they would not have imagined.

He also targeted the Congress and Samajwadi Party saying both the parties have always neglected the welfare of women but under the BJP government, women are at the centre of the country's success story.

Terming the INDIA bloc members "anti-women", Modi said had the Congress been in power, kitchen expenses in every household would have gone up two to three times.

Modi also said the Congress' rule is mentioned in the popular Hindi movie song "Mehngai dayain khaye jaat hai".

He also exhorted women to go to polling booths in groups of 25-30 "with dhol-nagare" to cast their votes.

The voting in the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat is scheduled to take in the seventh and last phase of the Lok Sabha election on June 1.