SP wants to keep Jamia encounter alive

NEW DELHI: Unfazed by the Centre's refusal to order a judicial inquiry into the Jamia Nagar encounter, Samajwadi Party has decided to "keep hammering the issue to keep it alive till the Lok Sabha elections".
    
Worried that the BSP could hijack its traditional Muslim votebank in Uttar Pradesh in the general elections early next year, the SP leadership has decided to keep the issue of minority harassment on the boil by keeping incidents like Jamia Nagar gunbattle in public memory.
    
"We will keep on hammering this issue till the Lok Sabha elections as it is an important matter," a senior SP leader said on Sunday.
    
The SP leadership has realised that by raising the issue of minorities' isolation, especially after the serial bomb blasts rocking the nation, it can win more seats from UP.
    
The visit of SP general secretary Amar Singh to Jamia Nagar on two occasions this month, seems clearly aimed at wooing back the minorities, who have been the party's significant votebank for a long time.
    
"Several Muslims living in Delhi have relatives in Uttar Pradesh, which makes it easy to convey the message to electorate in UP by raking up the issue in Delhi," said a Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh.
    
While Singh has repeatedly been seeking a judicial probe into the incident, the pressure on Congress is expected to mount more with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav also joining the chorus for the same.

Yadav told reporters in Kanpur on Saturday that the inquiry into the encounter would bring out the truth.
       
"The inquiry will make clear how inspector M C Sharma died and also whether the two people killed were terrorists or not," he said.
       
Besides, BSP's efforts to attract the Muslim community in the state too has filled the SP cadre with a sense of urgency.
       
BSP earlier this month had organised a convention in Lucknow to discuss the marginalisation of the community in the wake of serial bomb blast incidents that had shaken the nation recently.
       
In last year's assembly elections in UP, the SP had finished a distant second with 97 seats, while the BSP had romped home with 206 seats in the 402 seat assembly.