"Work Speaks, Not the Person": Rajesh Yadav at Global Icon Awards

Work does the talking, not the individual behind it. That was the line BJP leader Rajesh Yadav returned to as chief guest at the Inspiring Global Icon Awards – Season 2, held at the Constitution Club of India in Delhi on June 28.

Yadav, vice president of the BJP's Uttar Pradesh unit, cast Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath as the architects of a modern India. For seventy years, he said, the country had no dedicated residence for its prime minister — now one stands built, alongside the new Central Vista. Too much, in his telling, had simply been run on what the British left behind.

He turned to roads to make his point. Yadav recalled a time when single-lane highways were the norm and newspapers routinely carried headlines about bus collisions that killed scores. The shift to four-lane and six-lane corridors, he credited to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nitin Gadkari, calling it a change the audience had witnessed for themselves.

The mood in the country has changed under Modi, Yadav told the gathering of achievers. He said India was moving at bullet-train speed, with young people accessing loans through the Mudra scheme to start out on their own. He drew a sharp contrast for farmers: buying a tractor once meant borrowing at 13 percent while a car loan sat at 4 percent — an imbalance he said Modi had corrected, leaving the farmer stronger for it.