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After being released, Joshi led a delegation to UP Governor BL Joshi's office with memorandum seeking his intervention for a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the alleged murder of Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr YS Sachan, who was found dead in mysterious circumstances inside a toilet of the Lucknow district jail on June 22. She also demanded a similar investigation in the deaths of two CMOs Dr BP Singh and Dr Vinod Arya, who were gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of Lucknow.
"The family members of the deceased have accused people sitting at the highest level for masterminding Dr Sachan's murder, but the government is clearly shirking away from handing over the case to CBI," said Joshi.
Congress Legislature Party leader Pramod Tiwari, who was also arrested during the protest, said, "Considering the fact that the involvement of bigwigs in large scale pilferage of National Rural Health Mission funds was the prime factor behind the murder, a CBI probe alone will tumble out skeletons out of the cupboard."
It was clearly an impressive show by the Congress that was able to muster up such huge support in the states. Thousands of protestors converged at the Bal Sanghralaya grounds near the Lucknow railway station from where they headed for Vidhan Sabha.
However, a huge posse of the khakhi-clad policemen formed an impregnable barricade to prevent them from moving forward. However, the police refrained from using force against the demonstrators who kept on raising anti-Mayawati slogans as they were packed off into buses.
Terming the Bahujan Samaj Party government as a "government of rapists", Congress activists raised slogans to highlight the failures of the Mayawati administration. "Mayawati has failed miserably in maintaining law and order in the state. In UP, the law of the jungle prevails and crimes against women are simply on the rise," Bahuguna Joshi told mediapersons.
"Democracy has come to a complete standstill in this state to the extent that a political party is not even allowed to stage a demonstration," she said. "In fact no sooner did we move an application on June 24, seeking permission to stage our protest, the state administration clamped section 144 of CrPC, obviously with the intent of preventing the Congress party from carrying out its demonstration," she added.
Lucknow district magistrate Anil Kumar Sagar however maintained, "Section 144 has been in place for more than a month so we could not have granted anybody the permission to demonstrate in a public place."