Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath on Tuesday tried to allay fears about his hardline Hindutva politics and stuck to the development agenda during his speech to the Lok Sabha. He praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi and promised to deliver a state free of corruption and riots. He also vowed to work for all sections of the society and create “a new structure of progress”, reported The Hindu.

Adityanath has yet to resign from his Lok Sabha seat from Gorakhpur, which he has won five consecutive times. He insisted that his constituency has not had a single riot in the past five years. “In Uttar Pradesh last year, under the Samajwadi Party government, there were 403 small riots, but not a single one of them in Gorakhpur,” he said.

The chief minister said he had always raised issues that affect the poor and the marginal sections of the society, such as Japanese Encephalitis. “There were members here who belonged to parties that were running the government in UP then, who gave grand statements about the poor and including them in the growth story, but never did anything for these people,” he said.

He took oath to office on Sunday after the Bharatiya Janata Party won a whopping 325 seats along with its allies in the state Assembly, which has 403 members. Adityanath is known for kicking up controversies with his strong Hindutva views. In January, he had praised US President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban order against citizens from Muslim-majority nations and tried to make a case for a similar restriction in India. He has in the past spoken brazenly against several minority groups, especially Muslims.

Clarification: An older version of this story quoted Adityanath as saying that there have been no riots in Gorakhpur since 1996. This has been changed.