Union home minister Amit Shah made a veiled attack on the previous Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh at the UP Global Investors Summit here on Friday, saying the then (chief) minister held the state’s investor summit in Delhi and admitted that people did not want to come to Lucknow.

“I am not here to make political comments but when I stayed in Gujarat and was a minister there, in Lucknow there was a press conference of the (chief) minister of that time. They were also holding an investors summit but the venue was Delhi. A journalist from Economic Times asked him that since you are holding an investment summit for UP then why have you kept the venue in Delhi? He had to eventually admit that because people were not willing to come to Lucknow, we had to hold it in Delhi,” Shah said. “When someone is not willing to come to Lucknow for an investor summit, how will he agree to invest here?”

He expressed joy that investors from across the world have come to Lucknow for this year’s summit.

During his tenure, former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav had held investors summits in Agra, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Yadav has been criticising the global investors summits as an “eyewash” on which the BJP government was spending the public’s hard-earned money and which will not fetch enough investment as the government was yet to give a break up of investment materialised after the first summit of 2018.

Shah said that in his experience, at least eight out of the country’s top 25 companies started as MSMEs. MSME is the seed that holds the potential for companies to become top companies of the country, he said.