Why is Amitabh missing from campaign scene?

New Delhi, April 4 (IANS) Noticed something? Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan is conspicuously absent from the Samajwadi Party campaign scene.

With party general secretary Amar Singh being a close friend, Bachchan had campaigned extensively in the assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh in 2007. He had even featured in the party's ads. But it suffered an embarrassing defeat at that time.

And now Bachchan seems to be nowhere around the heat and dust of politics even though his wife Jaya Bachchan is a party MP. Although it is still unclear whether he has distanced himself or the party has dropped him, his absence is surely another star, Sanjay Dutt's, gain.

Dutt, who cannot contest from Lucknow after the Supreme Court refused to suspend his conviction for owning illegal arms, has become the star campaigner of the party.

The party has already appointed Dutt as its general secretary and has declared that he will be campaigning throughout the country.