Vikas Dubey, the Kanpur gangster on the run after he killed eight Uttar Pradesh policemen trying to arrest him on July 3, turned up at Ujjain’s Mahakal temple in Madhya Pradesh early on Thursday morning.

The Madhya Pradesh government rushed to take credit for the arrest. “Those who think their sins will wash away by going to Mahakal, they have not understood the Lord.

Our government won’t spare any criminal,” Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan tweeted, praising Ujjain Police for the breakthrough.

The pushback from opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi came soon after. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav tweeted the first shot, asking the government to clarify if his arrest was a surrender or an arrest.

He also asked the Yogi Adityanath government to make his phone records public so that people who had collaborated with the gangster could be exposed.

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said Vikas Dubey’s arrest reflected that the UP police had “completely failed” to act with alacrity.

Gandhi also referred to reports that local police officers in Kanpur haad kept Vikas Dubey’s name out of the list of most wanted criminals to allege collusion.

There has been no word on who shot this video. Or the one in which Vikas Dubey is heard telling policemen that “I am Vikas Dubey, from Kanpur” before a policeman slaps him on the head.

Srinivas, responding to home minister Narottam Mishra’s statement about the MP police being on alert, called it a “good joke”.