Targeting the BJP government as it hosts the DefExpo here, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday pulled out a video clip that showed IAF planes performing touchdowns on an expressway built when he was chief minister. Posting the clip on Twitter, Yadav said his own state government had laid a “concrete path for the country’s defence”.
The video showed fighter aircraft using a stretch of the Agra-Lucknow expressway as an emergency runway. A caption described the 3.3 km stretch as the country's first "road runway".
"No, you are mistaken. This is not a sight from Lucknow’s DefenceExpo,” the former chief minister tweeted in Hindi.
“But it’s a view from the day when the Samajwadi government gave people a top-class transportation facility and along with it prepared a concrete path for the country’s defence,” he added.
A day earlier, Yadav had tweeted a picture of the Gomti riverfront developed during the Samajwadi Party government's term. “This is not somewhere abroad, but Lucknow,” he tweeted.
The five-day DefenceExpo-2020 will showcase defence equipment manufactured by firms across the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it on Wednesday.