Will continue to damage Mayawati statues, says founder of group that vandalised statue

Amit Agrawal alias Amit Gupta alias Amit Jani, 32, the founder of Uttar Rajya Navnirman Sena (URNS) has said that the members of his organisation will continue vandalising the statues of Mayawati in the state.

"We damaged the statue of the former chief minister and BSP president on Thursday in Lucknow. I have no regrets about it. We will continue demolishing her other statues," he said from an undisclosed location.

Although Amit is continuously giving a slip to the police, he is there in the reach of a section of media. The police had traced his last location in Raja Mandi area of Agra at around 12 midnight.

"We are not criminals as the UP Police are claiming. We belong to good families. But our ideological commitment compels us to reject the politicians who try to superimpose their personal whims and fancies on the people. Once the dust is settled, I will take out a rath yatra across the state to galvanise the people against such a trend. I will also try to take the signature of at least two crore people who express their support for me during my rath yatra," he said.

Amit said he has full confidence in the ideology of the SP.

"My organisation has no connection with the SP but it is true that I am personally an SP worker. I had campaigned for the party during the assembly election and I have submitted an application with the party seeking Lok Sabha ticket from Baghpat," he said.

Meanwhile, a large number of BSP workers on Thursday night ransacked a house owned by Amit in Shiv Shakti Nagar of Meerut. Scared by the seriousness of the incident, Shivam Verma and his family members, who live in the house on rent, shifted elsewhere in the night.

"The BSP workers told us that they were identifying all the houses of Amit and would set them on fire after receiving a green signal from their leaders. They were so angry that we decided to leave the area to save our lives," Verma said.

Some relatives of Amit who live in Kankarkheda area of Meerut also locked their houses and escaped from there. His two houses in Meerut city were also found locked from outside.

On the other hand, alert SP workers removed the banners of party president Mulayam Singh Yadav and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav from the walls of Amit's office in Street No 10 of Bungalow Area in Meerut within a few hours of Mayawati's statue being vandalised in Lucknow.

Since anybody can get photographed with the politicians it doesn't establish any political or ideological connection between them, Mulayam had said on Thursday and promptly distanced himself from Amit. The photographs of other SP leaders with Amit, which were seen on his Facebook page on Thursday, were also not there on Friday.

But Sanjay Yadav, a SP member and a friend of Amit, silently uploaded the photograph of the beheaded statue of Mayawati on his Facebook page on Thursday night, giving a reason to BSP leader Swami Prasad Maurya to claim that "the state government was behind the incident".

But there are also reasons to believe that Amit is a stable youth. In his article on the hate politics of Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena against north Indians, posted on his own Facebook page, Amit has dubbed Mayawati as "UP ki beti" (daughter of UP). People in Meerut also know him as a fan of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

While waiting for a political launch, Amit still hopes that Mulayam will field him in 2014 Parliamentary election from Baghpat.

Originally from Patla town of Ghaziabad, Amit's father Lakhi Chand Gupta, a wood supplier, had shifted to Meerut three decades ago and established his business there. Amit, a college dropout, joined the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) of Om Prakash Chautala in 2005. He contested 2007 assembly election from Khekra seat on the INLD ticket and got only 1984 votes.

He joined the SP with the help of a local party leader Sarojini Agrawal in 2009. But feeling uncomfortable without having any significant assignment, he founded URNS in 2010 and declared it as a branch of the SP. He staged several violent protests against Shiv Sena and MNS in 2010 and 2011. Every time the URNS members vandalised public property cases were registered against them and police also arrested some of the URNS workers but Amit was always spared.

He accompanied Akhilesh's Kranti Rath Yatra in Meerut and Ghaziabad in 2011 and addressed several rallies for the SP.