You can not strip politics from Uttar Pradesh. Just hours before the second T20 between India and West Indies, Lucknow’s Ekana Stadium is renamed to ‘Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee International Stadium’. Well, we have no idea how veteran leader Lal Krishna Advani must be thinking about this. It has been said that Akhilesh Yadav, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh felt quite contented ever since the venue has been confirmed.
After hosting some domestic matches, Lucknow will host an international cricket match after 2 decades. It has a seating capacity of around 50,000 and will be the 52nd stadium to host a cricket match. Uttar Pradesh also has Green Park stadium in Kanpur that has also hosted many international matches, however, the new stadium has better drainage facilities, seating capacity, floodlights, dressing room, toilets etc.
Talking about the name game, Yogi Government has been criticized badly after changing ancient city’s name of Allahabad to Prayagraj. People hold an opinion that this name game is only focused on diverting the public’s mind away from government failures. A PIL has also been logged in Allahabad Highcourt stating that changing name has got nothing to do with either public’s interest nor government’s. The name game seems to be the most loved administrative role of Yogi as during his tenure as MP of Gorakhpur, he changed names of many places:
-Urdu Bazaar to Hindi Bazaar
-Ali Nagar to Arya Nagar
-Miya Bazaar to Maya Bazaar
-Islampur to Iswarpur and many more. However, most of them are known by their old names and even government records also did not change them. We think that this seriality will not stop soon and the government would keep focusing on changing names rather than catering to more fundamental issues like education, health, crime, business etc.
Even if the government wanted to change the name, this could have done earlier as VoxyTalksy visited the venue on 5th November and we found that it was Ekana, not the new name that appeared everywhere.
It is to be noted that the schedule of any cricket series is decided months ago and Lucknow as the venue was decided more than a month ago.
