Police arrest a Samajwadi Party worker for forcefully grabbing a house in Mainpuri. Police arrest a Samajwadi Party worker for forcefully grabbing a house in Mainpuri.

Cracks have started to appear from within the Samajwadi Party fortress in Uttar Pradesh. The epicentre of the latest is Mainpuri, the fiefdom of party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav.

On Saturday, over a dozen armed men barged into the house of one Vidya Devi Chauhan, a retired schoolteacher, in Mainpuri's Katra area. The goons held the terrorised woman and her granddaughter Maneesha hostage while they drank beer after locking the house from inside. Then they threatened Chauhan and told her to vacate the house immediately. This was a tried-and-tested formula used by SP goons - place the party flag on a house and it is yours. But not any more.

Brave locals

Some local residents sensed that something was happening in the house. They rushed, some with their licensed guns, after the goons fired from inside. Some of Chauhan's relatives, who live nearby, also arrived after receiving information about them being held hostage.

What ensued after that was something that had not happened before. Local residents decided to take on the goons themselves - an unprecedented move in the SP stronghold - after the police started dilly dallying on taking action.

The policemen, too, lost their cool after four goons attacked inspector R.K. Chaudhary.

The police team, led by Mainpuri Superintendent of Police Srikant Singh, surrounded the house and challenged the criminals to surrender. While some goons took shelter in an adjacent municipal corporation office, others sought refuge in the local SP office and locked it from inside. The superintendent of police later said nine men, including Sunil Yadav, Sonu Yadav, Sandeep Yadav and Nand Kishore, have been arrested and four vehicles with SP flags seized. "We have also recovered three country-made pistols and two revolvers from their possession," the superintendent of police said.

Saturday's was one of the six attempts at house grabbing in the last month. In most cases, the goons have prominently displayed SP flags on their cars.

Long held in contempt for their equal role in corruption, even government officials have now started raising their voice against SP's rogues elements even as Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav seem least interested in making them fall in line.

Bold babus

Vinod Kumar Rai, deputy director of Jhansi's Government Soil Conservation Centre (SCS), had recently accused the husband of an SP MLA of kidnapping and beating him (Rai).

He said he will continue his fight till Jai Prakash Arya alias Pappu Seth, husband of Rashmi Arya, SP MLA from Mauranipur, is put behind bars. "Pappu Seth is a wood mafia working in close coordination with some corrupt employees of my own department. Bhanu Pratap, a clerk in my department, had encouraged Pappu Seth to kidnap me and beat me up. He has been arrested on my police complaint," Rai told MAIL TODAY.

"Now I have pledged that I will not sit idle till Pappu Seth, a goonda of the ruling party, is arrested," he added Though the change has started to appear on the horizon, many instances where SP goons have victimised the people and even killed some people continue to be reported.

The most recent was one involving Saurabh Yadav, son-inlaw of Lakhan Singh Yadav, a cousin of Mulayam, and his aides on April 22. They killed two persons over a land dispute in Etah near Mainpuri. The owner of the land had refused to leave the land for Yadav and dared to register a complaint with the police.