 "Akhilesh Yadav")
Even as the Akhilesh Yadav-led Uttar Pradesh government has entered election year with high octane public contact programmes planned being in the coming months, law and order remains the nibbling Achilles' heel of the state's youngest ever chief minister.
While, Akhilesh government has yet not been slapped with any major charge of corruption or impropriety, he has piloted major development and infrastructure projects in the state viz. Agra-Lucknow Expressway, Lucknow Metro Rail, proposed Lucknow-Ballia Purvanchal Expressway, connecting district headquarters with four lane roads etc.
Some other flagship projects include Lucknow IT City being developed by HCL, Lucknow International Cricket Stadium, Trans Ganga City (Kanpur), Saraswati Hitech City (Allahabad) etc.
However, his government has time and again been cornered on the issue of deteriorating law and order situation in UP, including the state capital of Lucknow.
In the last four years, UP Police have witnessed about 10 Director General of Police (DGP) leading the force under Akhilesh rule. Besides, the government has been charged with favouring senior cops belonging to a particular caste (Yadav) in the field postings, including station house officers (SHO) and station officers (SO) and circle officers (CO).
This political interference has been attributed as a major factor in the perceptible low police morale amongst cops and general policing in UP.
Realising this hard fact and the actual ground situation, which has the potential to derail the ruling Samajwadi Party's (SP) plans for staging a comeback in the next UP polls, Akhilesh has now stepped in and announced to personally monitor the law and order situation.
Addressing the media here on completing four years in office on March 15, he had quipped that when the opposition failed to get excuses to target him, they always took recourse to the law and order issue. However, he had also thanked the media for keeping him alert by reporting incidents of crime in the state.
Of late, there have been numerous incidents where policemen have been assaulted and even killed in UP. Besides, there have been cases, which made national headlines, but have yet not been solved. For example, the UP Police has yet not solved a case, in which two motorcycle-borne assailants had killed three persons and looted cash from an ATM booth in broad daylight in Lucknow.
Ever since, the Akhilesh government came to power, there have been spurt in cases of communal violence and riots as well, including the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013, in which several people were killed and thousands of others were displaced.
Meanwhile, Yadav is likely to kickoff extensive tours of remote areas in UP for taking firsthand information and feedback from the grassroots about development projects and the law and order situation.
Samajwadi Party President Mulayam Singh Yadav had on quite many occasions advised Akhilesh to look beyond his coterie of officials and leaders to know the ground situation with regards to public mood before poll bugle is sounded.
