Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said that the state under his rule has seen no cases of mob lynching similar to Alwar as no illegal slaughterhouses are operational.

In an interview with The Times of India, Adityanath said, “Had we not closed down illegal slaughter houses in UP, there would have been maximum number of mob-lynching in UP.”

The first-time Chief Minister and five-time Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP also said that it’s obligatory on every state to crack down on lynching incidents. However, refuting the opposition charges that cases of lynching have increased under the BJP government at the Centre, Yogi repeated what Union home minister Rajnath Singh recently said in the parliament - that the worst mob-lynching happened under the Congress rule in 1984.

Yogi also said that people should respect each other’s sentiments, referring to cow smuggling and slaughter that hurts the majority sentiments and is illegal under the constitution.

The BJP government at the Centre has recently come under attack from the Opposition, which claims that lynchings have increased manifold since the BJP came to power, many of them in the name of cow protection. However, law enforcement agencies have arrested close to 2,200 cow smugglers from Rajasthan in the last three years.