SP and Congress train guns over wolf attacks; BJP says UP govt to take ‘stringent action’

Lucknow: The Samajwadi Party and the Congress are gearing up for bypolls to 10 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, with the INDIA bloc partners targeting the state government over its “undemocratic” working style, “collapse” of law and order and the recent spate of wolf attacks.

The bypolls, the schedule for which is yet to be announced, were necessitated by the election of the incumbent MLAs to the Lok Sabha and the disqualification of one legislator.

Leaders of the two parties, which contested the Lok Sabha elections in an alliance in Uttar Pradesh, have confirmed that they would contest the bypolls “unitedly”. Samajwadi Party chief spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary told news agency, “The govt has failed on this front (stopping wolf attacks). It has made people of the entire state insecure. We are going to raise this (issue).”

“The govt’s style of working is not democratic. They have not done any development and they want to remain in govt,” he said. Echoing the Samajwadi Party leader, Ajay Rai -- the Congress’ state unit chief -- told news agency that the government failed to control the wolf-attack situation and the “terror” was moving towards the cities.“The other issues plaguing the state are the collapse of law and order, fake encounters, rising inflation and unemployment,” he said.

The BJP, on the other hand, said the state govt was making every effort to resolve the wolf-attack problem. Eight people, seven of them children, were killed and about three dozen injured in alleged wolf attacks in Bahraich district in the last two months, official figures show. The district’s Mahsi tehsil has recorded a series of wolf attacks since March. The frequency of attacks rose during the monsoon from July.

Four wolves have been captured but the attacks still continue, leading to experts suggesting that the real “man eaters” had not been caught.

There were also reports of suspected animal attacks in neighbouring Sitapur district. On September 2, three women in a village were injured in attacks by unidentified animals. While locals claimed that the women were attacked by wolves, officials of the forest department, which collected animal samples and footprints, suspected that jackals were behind the attacks.