Akhilesh is his own man, builds a following

December 29, 2016 02:02 am | Updated January 08, 2017 07:35 pm IST - New Delhi:

For the Samajwadi Party, it has been a turbulent year, with the Yadav family feud spilling onto the streets just months ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. But the party’s big positive has been that Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has emerged from a battle with patriarch Mulayam Singh unscathed, indeed, with his image enhanced.

Indeed, the SP’s strength today is Mr. Akhilesh Yadav, as I discovered while travelling through the State in late September. Among the Yadavs, especially the growing middle class in its ranks, his efforts to disassociate himself from his lathi brandishing party men have gone down well. For the youth, cutting across caste lines, he stands for modernity, progress and the miracle of technology. And the upper castes, hostile towards his father and uncle Shivpal Yadav are, oddly enough, well disposed towards him.

Mr. Akhilesh Yadav may have inherited his position but he has carved out an image distinct from that of his father and the rest of his family, demonstrating that he isn’t just another dynast. He has thus far proved the sceptics — who believed the family feud would destroy him —wrong, though the battle he has fought within his own family is one of epic proportions. Ranged against him have been his father, Mr. Shivpal Yadav, his father’s second wife and son by that marriage, and friend, Amar Singh.

 

 

The young Chief Minister may not have won every skirmish: for instance, Mr. Shivpal Yadav eventually retained his Cabinet berth and replaced Mr. Akhilesh Yadav as State party chief, but this has not been seen as a sign of weakness. For, he has made two things clear: he is the CM candidate and, in a recent media interview, he ruled out the possibility of Mr. Amar Singh playing a role in candidate selection.

Good record

As the year wound down to a close, he skilfully continued to maintain relations with the rest of his family, while focussing on his own record as Chief Minister as the centrepiece of the SP’s election campaign.

Indeed, the entire advertising campaign is centred on him: one TV advertisement shows a day in his life, as Chief Minister and then as family man, at the dinner table surrounded only by his wife, party MP Dimple Yadav, and three children. In the closing days of 2016, Mr. Akhilesh Yadav has also sought to re-emphasise his approach to governance and politics through decisions, related to both the party and the government.

In quick succession, his government first set aside around 60 per cent of the supplementary budget for a single project — the 348-km Samajwadi Poorvanchal expressway — and a day later, gave the nod to include 17 Other Backward Castes on the Scheduled Castes (SC) list. On the party front, he has submitted a list of candidates, in which several sitting MLAs with unsavoury records don’t find a place.

Reaching out

So, even as he has re-emphasised his commitment to modernise the State, he has hit at rival Bahujan Samaj Party’s Dalit base, while reaching out to the Most Backward Castes, who largely voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014.

The new OBCs included in the SC quota will find it easier to compete there than within the OBC quota, a lion’s share of which usually goes to the more educated OBCs.

In the process, there will be less left for the BSP base among Dalits in the SC quota, and more room for the Yadavs in the OBC quota.

Through his list of candidates, he has also sent out a clear message: he wants a clean party.

Mr. Akhilesh Yadav has publicly said he would like a tie-up with the Congress (that would help him consolidate the Muslim vote) but, for the moment, neither his father nor the Congress has shown too much interest in such an arrangement.

In 2011-12, when he had begun to prepare for the last U.P. elections, Mr. Akhilesh Yadav’s objective had been to transform the battle-scarred SP into a tech-savvy, cosmopolitan, post-Anna Hazare organisation, hoping this would help the party shed its image of being an anti-English, anti-technology gathering of parochial musclemen, while retaining its socialist ideals.

The SP won a clear majority in 2012 and Mr. Akhilesh Yadav, the face of the campaign, became Chief Minister. Now almost five years later, he may not have accomplished what he had set out to do, but he is that much closer to his goal.

And he has used the rift in the Yadav family to demonstrate that the transition from the Mulayam Singh era to the Akhilesh Yadav one is almost complete.

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