The Samajwadi Party which has claimed the state machinery will come to a grinding halt during the partys three-day agitation starting from March 7,seems to have announced the agitation plan without making the required preparations. A week after the announcement of the plan for agitation,the SP has not only rescheduled the statewide protests,it has also called the meeting of the district office-bearers here on February 26,to chalk out the strategy. SP had earlier at its state executive meet at Gorakhpur announced to hold the agitation from March 1. The SP maintains there is no confusion over the dates for the agitation. At present,the party is,however,clueless as to how it will bring the state machinery to a halt. The blue-print of the agitation is yet to be decided, said Ambika Chowdhary,senior SP leader and chief whip of the party in state Assembly. He added that it was not unusual to give a call for bringing the state machinery to a grinding halt. We will do it by staging sit-in demonstrations and by other democratic means while maintaining peace, he said. In Gorakhpur,SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav equating UP chief minister Mayawati had exhorted the cadres to defy the tyrant BSP regime,and bring the state machinery to a standstill during the three-day agitation. SP sources said most of the agitations organised by the party after the BSP came to power in May 2007,have ended up in merely a photo opportunity and there was no involvement of the common people and the agitations were sustained solely by the party cadres. This is election time and repeating old-style agitation will be of no use for the party faced with do-or-die battle for 2012 Assembly elections, said a senior SP leader. SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav in his concluding address at Gorakhpur had expressed his dissatisfaction over the previous agitations launched by the party. A poor Dalit girl dares the might of the state power and slaps a police officer to meet the chief minister in Kushi Nagar and women accusing a minister for the murder of her husband and demanding lodging of FIR against the accused can dare to block the CMs fleet in Aligarh and similar incident occurs in Jhansi. The women took the cudgels against the government without any political support which shows the level of frustration against the BSP government, said Brij Bhushan Tewari,national vice-president of the SP. Its high time for the Opposition to strike. We will do our best to ensure maximum participation of the common people in the three-day long agitation, said Tewari adding the popularity graph of the BSP government has particularly nose-dived in recent months due to the spurt in crime against women and Dalits in the state. SP also claimed that there is nothing new in the call for agitation issued at Gorakhpur as it is the established tradition of the party. It has been the tradition in the Samajwadi Party to announce for agitation or give some new slogan for galvanizing the party cadres after the the state executive meet. So there is nothing new in the call for agitation issued after the state executive meet at Gorakhpur, said Akhilesh Yadav,MP and state president of the SP.
