After his first public spat with father Mulayam Singh Yadav and the extended family clan a month ago, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav emerged a hero.
He might have been forced to reinstate one of the two scam-tainted ministers he had sacked; and he may have lost the Samajwadi Party’s U.P. chief’s job — and with it, the biggest say in the distribution of tickets for next year’s Assembly polls — but the ranks of his admirers only swelled.
Middle class backing
Last month, as I covered a vast swathe of central and eastern U.P., it was evident that among the Yadavs, the SP’s core constituency, he had endeared himself to the community’s growing middle class that no longer wished to be associated with the Yadav and Akhilesh’s uncle, Shivpal Yadav. The youths — cutting across class, caste and religion — felt he identified with their interests and aspirations. And the upper castes were not hostile to him as they were to the rest of the Yadav clan.
Indeed, a majority in all three categories, urban and rural, said Akhilesh was the party’s “only political asset,” someone keen to modernise the State.
But now, that optimism has faded. The first real blow to Akhilesh — and the SP — came when his father announced on October 14 that the newly elected party MLAs would decide the State’s next Chief Minister.
That was the turning point.
Late realisation
In an electoral contest where the BJP, the BSP and the SP are jockeying for top spot, an SP without Akhilesh would lose the edge it had — something Mulayam Singh eventually realised. On October 17, he fielded party vice-president Kiranmay Nanda to say Akhilesh was the party’s CM face.
“The SP chief was talking about the procedure of electing a CM … Akhilesh is our CM and he will be the party’s CM face. This is Netaji [Mulayam]’s message,” Mr Nanda said.
The choice of Mr. Nanda was interesting: he is from West Bengal not U.P. and therefore an “outsider.” (For years together, he was a minister in the Left Front government in West Bengal). Evidently, Mulayam Singh did not trust a family member to deliver this message with any degree of credibility.
But that’s not the end of the story: on September 19, Akhilesh wrote to his father in the latter’s capacity as president, announcing that he would embark on November 3 on the Samajwadi Vikas Rath Yatra — that he was to have started on October 3 — “in preparation for the coming Assembly elections.” A detailed tour programme would be sent to SP district units, he continued, from time to time. The letter ended: “For your kind information.”
But what was left unsaid was more important: that he was not going to depend on the SP’s official machinery headed by Shivpal; and that he won’t be available for the SP’s silver jubilee celebrations in Lucknow on November 5.
Appeal to Mulayam
On Thursday, SP MLC and Akhilesh acolyte Udayveer Singh wrote to Mulayam Singh, asking him to step down and let his son take his place. He also hinted at the role being played in the party’s internal politics by Mulayam Singh’s second wife Sadhna Gupta, mother of his other son, Prateek Yadav (believed to have business dealings with State Minister Gayatri Prajapati, who was re-instated after first being sacked).
In his letter, the young MLC has accused her of harbouring ill feelings towards her stepson Akhilesh, and of colluding with Shivpal to harm him, something that thus far was only whispered in Lucknow’s drawing rooms.
For Akhilesh, it is going to be tough to convince the electorate that if the SP is re-elected, he will be given a free hand.
The cadres are demoralised. Muslims, for whom the SP was first choice, are, reports suggest, considering moving their votes to the BSP as that appears to be recovering ground, even as the SP weakens.
The next few months will demonstrate whether Akhilesh can get his admirers to trust him again.
