Samajwadi Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday urged Governor Ram Naik to “wake up” the Adityanath-led state government, PTI reported.

“The governor used to intervene on law and order earlier [during the Samajwadi Party’s regime],” Yadav told reporters after meeting Naik. “It was said that there were only Yadav officers...Now there is hardly any Yadav SP or DM. We have requested him [governor] to wake up the government and give direction to control the prevailing ‘jungle-raj’.”

Yadav claimed that the law-and-order situation in Uttar Pradesh is deteriorating. Along with senior party leader Ahmad Hasan, Yadav gave a memorandum to Naik seeking his intervention.

“Bar council chairperson is being murdered in her chamber,” the former chief minister said. “There is murder in jail...How these are happening? The state government is responsible.”

Darvesh Singh Yadav, the first woman to head the Uttar Pradesh Bar Council, was shot dead on the civil court premises in Agra on Wednesday during a welcome ceremony organised for her. She was elected to the post on June 9. The attacker, a fellow colleague of Yadav, shot her thrice. After the murder, Manish Sharma tried to kill himself.

Last week, the Congress had alleged that “law and order situation is ineffective” in the state and criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh for increasing atrocities against women and Dalits. There were several incidents of rape of minors reported in Uttar Pradesh in the past week. These came days after the murder of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl in Aligarh.

The Adityanath government has also been criticised for the arrest of Delhi-based journalist Prashant Kanojia last week for comments about the chief minister on Twitter. The following day, two other journalists were arrested for allegedly defaming Adityanath, enraging the media fraternity.