Tough times ahead for ruling Samajwadi Party in the 2017 Assembly elections

Here are two important reasons to believe that the Samajwadi Party (SP) would find it difficult to win the 2017 Assembly elections. The lawyers used to be a strong constituent of SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. They stood behind him in 2012 and helped in making his son Akhilesh the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

But the recent murder of Allahabad lawyer Nabi Ahmad by Shailendra Singh, a sub-inspector, has left them disillusioned. It would prove a double trouble for Mulayam because Ahmad was not only a lawyer, but he also belonged to the minority community, which has been a vote bank of the SP.

Although Akhilesh has announced a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to the family of the deceased, the general feeling in the lawyer community was that the government was trying to protect the killer police officer.

Before that, the police had brutally attacked lawyers in Lucknow on March 9, when they were protesting against the decision of the government to shift the tehsil office to the outskirts of the city. While the government had blamed the lawyers for taking law and order in their own hands and booked them, the Allahabad High Court has set up a judicial probe into the batoncharge on them and ordered the police not to take any further action against those who were allegedly involvement in violence.

The closely knit lawyer community is a strong opinion maker in Uttar Pradesh and can easily upset the applecart of the SP.

The lawyers of west UP are also angry with the SP because Mulayam has often supported setting up of an Allahabad HC bench in the region, but failed to do so after coming to power.

The Muslim community, on the other hand, has still not forgotten the murder of Kunda DSP Zia-ul-Haq on March 2, 2013. Though Food and Civil Supplies Minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya has been acquitted in the case, the community believed that he was too powerful under the SP rule to get trapped in any case.

The death of Khalid Mujahid- an accused in the 2007 serial court blasts-under mysterious circumstances on May 19, 2013, in police custody, is in sharp contrast to the promise of the SP in its 2012 Assembly election manifesto that the Muslim youths languishing in several jails of the state for their alleged role in terror activities would be released and the police officers responsible for their arrests would be brought to book.

While the community hopes that their youth would be out of prison, they were left feeling scared after Khalid's death, as several brutal injury marks were found on his body.