Durga Nagpal suspension: Akhilesh's popularity takes a beating

The intervention by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, further angered the SP leadership, sources say. After this, a leader told IANS, the SP bosses decided not to "give an inch" on the matter. The SP general secretary and party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav's cousin, Ram Gopal Yadav, dared the union government to withdraw all IAS officers from Uttar Pradesh. The SP's Rajya Sabha MP, Naresh Agarawal, made personal attacks on Sonia Gandhi and her son-in-law Robert Vadra.



BJP spokespan Vijay Bahadur Pathak admitted to IANS that this was "by far the biggest blot on the Akhilesh Yadav government. The people of the state gave a mandate to the SP by seeing the clean image of Akhilesh Yadav but (that) began to crack as soon as images of lumpen SP workers ransacking the stage where the swearing in of the state government took place were flashed across TV channels. It is only coming full circle now," he opined.

Whatever be the political consequences of the ongoing battle of nerves between Nagpal and the state government, what is crystal clear is that Akhilesh Yadav's image will never be the same again and so would be the morale of the bureaucracy in country's largest state (by population).