(Top) Mayor Anjula Singh Mahaur. (Above) Actress Sushmita Sen with her brother Rajeev walks the ramp for Sanjana Jon at the Wills India Fashion Week in Delhi on Sunday.

Lucknow, Oct. 29: So what she walked the ramp? The mayor of Agra has also promised to pace the filth-choked streets of the Taj City.

But citizens of the home of the world’s most famous mausoleum have not taken it in their stride. They have already hit the roads — to pray for her “sanity”.

“We pray for the sanity of our mayor,” says Ramesh Srivastava, a septuagenarian crusader for the city’s modernisation.

It all started after mayor Anjula Singh Mahaur walked the ramp for designer Sanjana Jon at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in Delhi.

The BJP-nominated Mahaur, still excited after the October 24 ramp walk with actors Salman Khan and Sushmita Sen, says the show was organised to support the “fight against foeticide and protection of the girl child”.

“This is the first time that the mayor of a city had walked the ramp. But (after the show was over) I found myself surrounded by a whirlwind of protests. I don’t know why,” she says.

“Till now I have been busy with politics but now I am trying to develop interests in other fields as well. What’s wrong in that? I am not ignoring my role as a mayor, yet I have been doing some anchoring for a TV channel and judging talent-hunt programmes. A film role has also come my way.”

Her critics say they have every reason to remonstrate.

“If she wants to be hooked to beauty pageants, films and TV anchoring, let her do that, but first she should vacate her seat,” says Shabana Khandelwal, general secretary of the Uttar Pradesh women’s Congress.

Khandelwal today organised a “yagna” in Agra to pray that the mayor regains her “senses”. On Monday, too, Congress leaders had organised a yagna.

Khandelwal says the mayor should save some time to clean Agra, where thousands of foreigners flock every year to see the Taj only to be greeted by mounds of filth.

Tourist guides say the foreigners cover their noses when they see the open drains and choked sewers as they cross the potholed roads to the 17th-century monument to love.

Anand Bardhan, a senior civic official, says the clean-up drive couldn’t be sustained because of shortage of safai karamcharis (cleaning staff) and funds as well as lack of political will.

But Mahaur, who became mayor in November 2006, has promised to do her best. “Cleaning Taj City? Oh yes, it’s a long-drawn battle against dirt and squalor,” she says. But she would go to a new locality every day, take a count of the safai karamcharis and build pressure on the state government and the Centre to release more funds for the clean-up drive.

“But give me a break,” she says. “It’s not a sin to join a ramp walk.”

For Sanjana — sister of celebrity fashion designer Anand Jon who has been jailed for life in America for multiple counts of sexual abuse — the show was a grand debut.

She dedicated it to her brother who she believes is innocent.