Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday announced that Kasari-Masari, once considered a stronghold of slain gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed, would be renamed and developed as Shrikrishnapuri.
Adityanath announced the decision after laying the foundation stone of a housing scheme for the poor on the land confiscated from Atiq in 2022, a year before three petty criminals killed the gangster and his younger brother Ashraf in police custody in the city.
"Nobody was safe in Uttar Pradesh before 2017. A land on which Atiq and Ashraf put their feet would become theirs. But now the mafia remains silent when the government says this land belongs to the poor and a multi-storied housing project is coming up there," Adityanath said after the bhoomi pujan for the Padmaloka Residential Project in Kasari-Masari, where Atiq was born and lived.
"There was a time when the mafia had become a challenge for the administration and judiciary.... Those mob bosses have been decimated," he said, claiming that the criminals used to be sheltered by the Samajwadi Party government in the past. Atiq was in the SP for a long time.
"Brothers and sisters, there will not be Kasari-Masari any longer. We are developing this area as Srikrishnapuri," Adityanath said.