Akhilesh sets out to revamp SP ahead of 2024 LS polls, but self-reflection vital too

Sparking talk of a major overhaul in the Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav, on Sunday (July 3), removed all office bearers of the party’s national, state (barring the SP’s Uttar Pradesh chief Naresh Uttam Patel) and district units as well as its frontal organisations. The decision comes within a week of the SP’s shock defeats against the BJP in the bypolls for the Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha seats.

SP sources told The Federal that the move to dissolve all party units had been in the works since the UP assembly poll results that saw the BJP and Yogi Adityanath return to power for a second consecutive term despite Akhilesh leading a spirited election campaign and stitching together a formidable coalition of caste-based parties.

The decision to remove all office bearers across the entirety of the organisation, a senior party functionary said, had been delayed because Yadav did not want to ruffle feathers within the party ahead of the biennial elections for UP legislative council (conducted in April) and the Rajya Sabha (held in June) as well as the bypolls for Azamgarh and Rampur. New appointments to all the party positions and frontal outfits of the SP are likely to be made “in a phased manner over the next two months”, the leader said.

Also read: Akhilesh dissolves SP national, state and district bodies; revamp on cards

Party insiders say though the shake-up may have been in the works since the UP assembly results in March, the imminent rejig of the SP that has now been necessitated will have to be “drastic” and “give a clear indication of Akhilesh’s strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls”.

A party MP told The Federal that the SP had “lost the political momentum it had gained during the UP assembly poll campaign.” Despite losing the assembly polls to the BJP, the SP had notched up its vote share by an impressive 10 per cent over the 2017 polls and its seat tally to 111 from the dismal 47 it had bagged five years ago.

“Within months of putting up a spirited fight, we were routed in the MLC elections but the leadership clearly took no note of what we were up against. Now, we have lost both Azamgarh and Rampur to the BJP. The morale of party workers has already begun to plummet and there is also hostility building up against Akhilesh’s working style among allies like (SBSP chief Om Prakash) Rajbhar and Mahan Dal. If we don’t mend our ways, all the leaders who had come to us before the elections will start defecting again,” the MP added.

Loss of Azamgarh, Rampur a loss of face

The bypoll defeat in Azamgarh and Rampur has come as a rude personal shock to Akhilesh. There is enough to suggest why the rout should worry the 49-yearold former UP chief minister.

Azamgarh is considered to be among the key electoral strongholds of the Yadav clan in UP – party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav had won the seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls despite the Narendra Modi wave and, five years later, Akhilesh too had ducked the Modi juggernaut here. Following his debut assembly poll win from Karhal, Akhilesh resigned the Azamgarh seat and took over as Leader of Opposition in the UP assembly, indicating that he was willing to keep up his political battle against the BJP in Lucknow.

Similarly, Rampur has been a personal fief of SP co-founder Azam Khan, who had won the seat for the SP in 2019. Like Akhilesh, Khan vacated the Rampur Lok Sabha seat in March after he won the assembly election in absentia – he was in jail throughout the campaign and was released on bail only last month.

For the bypolls, the SP had fielded Akhilesh’s cousin and former Badaun MP, Dharmendra Yadav, from Azamgarh against the BJP’s Dinesh Lal Yadav ‘Nirahua’, a hugely popular Bhojpuri actor. Nirahua had lost the 2019 Lok Sabha poll to Akhilesh by a margin of over 2.50 lakh votes. In the bypoll last week, Nirahua defeated Dharmendra Yadav by a narrow margin of 8679 votes.

The SP blamed Dharmendra’s defeat on alleged electoral malpractices by the BJP and a backdoor deal between the saffron party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. The BSP, which normally doesn’t contest any bypoll, had fielded Shah Alam ‘Guddu Jamali’ in the Azamgarh bypoll. Alam polled over 2.66 lakh votes and thus chipped away the anti-BJP votes.

The SP’s excuse, notwithstanding, the bypoll result was a poor reflection on Akhilesh’s leadership. Not only was the seat previously held by Akhilesh, who for reasons best known to him did not campaign for his cousin in Azamgarh or for party candidate Asim Raja in Rampur, but the SP had also won all assembly segments that fall under Azamgarh just three months ago.

‘Lethargy a la Rahul Gandhi the culprit’

In Azam Khan’s bastion of Rampur, the SP was humiliated at the hustings as it lost the seat to the BJP’s Ghanshyam Lodhi. Asim Raja lost Rampur by over 42000 votes despite the fact that Khan, who had won the seat in 2019 against the BJP’s Jaya Prada by a margin of nearly 1.10 lakh votes, campaigned for him extensively in the bipolar contest that saw neither the BSP nor the Congress fielding candidates.

Also read: Modi wears saffron cap, starts a trend in UP; other parties follow suit

SP leaders say the party’s defeat in the bypolls stemmed from reasons directly linked with Akhilesh’s political conduct in the months following the assembly poll results.

“When he decided to stay in Lucknow as the LoP, we were all hopeful that Akhilesh will continue the aggressive public outreach that he had started in the two months leading up to the assembly polls and will take the fight against the BJP to the streets. The past three months have seen him fall back to the comfort of tweeting his criticism against the BJP instead of doing anything significant at the grassroots. He is vocal in the assembly but that makes little difference as assembly sessions in UP are brief and interventions on the floor of the house don’t stay in public memory. This lethargy has upset our workers and our allies and there is a question mark on the seriousness of Akhilesh in taking on the BJP,” an SP MLA told The Federal.

A senior SP leader from eastern UP compared Akhilesh’s functioning to that of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and said the SP chief “needs to show a seriousness of purpose or let Netaji (Mulayam) and other leaders who have the party’s interest at heart run the show”.

“He is Netaji’s political heir only in name; his working style is like Rahul Gandhi’s. He becomes active just before elections and at other times, he likes to travel abroad or simply do his politics on social media. Netaji was surrounded by leaders of mass base and he listened to their advice but Tipu (Akhilesh) has a coterie that knows little about UP politics,” the senior leader said.

Not reaching out to Muslims, alliance leaders

Party insiders say Akhilesh’s refusal to aggressively speak for UP’s Muslims against the onslaught they have been facing by the BJP-backed Hindutva brigade and the palpably increasing trust deficit between him and Azam Khan have also irked the community that had voted en bloc for the SP-led coalition in March.

“When Yogi unleashed his bulldozers at Afreen’s (student activist Afreen Fatima) house in Allahabad and the homes of other Muslims, Akhilesh went missing. It was expected of Akhilesh to personally reach out to Afreen and others – if not on the same day then a day later – but he was just absent. He has not even shown interest in sorting out differences with Azam Khan, our tallest Muslim leader, and this has sent a very wrong message among the Muslim community, which obviously feels Akhilesh is taking its support for granted,” said another SP MLA.

It is widely acknowledged that the spirited fight that Akhilesh put up against the BJP in March drew much of its heft from the coalition the SP formed with caste-based parties such as Jayant Chaudhary’s RLD, OP Rajbhar’s SBSP, Krishna Patel’s Apna Dal (K), among others, and caste leaders such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chauhan who defected to the SP from the BJP ahead of the polls. Barring Chaudhary and Patel, SP insiders say Akhilesh’s equations with most of his other allies as well as his uncle and ally Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party- Lohia chief Shivpal Yadav have deteriorated steadily.

Several of these leaders are upset at Akhilesh for not considering their candidature for the MLC and Rajya Sabha polls that have been held over the past three months. Though Akhilesh did ensure Jayant Chaudhary’s election to the Rajya Sabha and also backed former Congress leader and independent candidate Kapil Sibal (reportedly at the insistence of Azam Khan who secured bail after hiring Sibal as his lawyer), sources say he has done little to pacify sulking leaders like Swami Prasad Maurya or disgruntled allies such as Rajbhar, Mahan Dal chief Keshav Dev Maurya and Janwadi Socialist Party chief Sanjay Chouhan.

Also read: BJP has become a company: Akhilesh Yadav on rising prices

SP sources say Keshav Dev and Sanjay Chouhan have threatened to quit the SP-led alliance on more than one occasion and may “part ways anytime”. Rajbhar too has been taking regular potshots at Akhilesh, questioning the SP chief’s appetite for fighting the BJP. The SBSP chief has even urged the Akhilesh and Mayawati to revive their alliance of 2019 that the BSP supremo had unilaterally broken after her party won 10 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats riding on a consolidation of votes of the two parties.

If Akhilesh is planning on revamping the party, there is much that he will need to think over before he actually makes the changes.

“In our traditional vote bank of Muslims and Yadavs – the Muslims are now restive while the Yadav’s too aren’t entirely united behind us. We had improved our vote share and seats because we brought together leaders of various castes who got us additional votes of their respective communities. Now these leaders are upset; several of them may break away but we need to hold on to the support we got. The reshuffle will have to reflect the aspirations of both our old and new voters,” said another SP leader.

He, however, added that “more than changes in the party, Akhilesh will have to change his own style of working.”