No match for NDA? Akhilesh's PDA plank going into quick tailspin in UP

With only two weeks left for the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections to commence, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s hope of diminishing the BJP-led NDA coalition in Uttar Pradesh with a PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) consolidation appears to be in a swift tailspin.

Most influential backward caste leaders that Akhilesh had lassoed into his party and the alliance of several smaller caste-based outfits he had stitched ahead of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly polls have deserted the SP in quick succession over the past few months.

Now, even as he continues to pitch the upcoming elections as a fight between PDA and NDA, Akhilesh’s own acts of omission and commission are visibly undermining his otherwise formidable poll plank.

Akhilesh draws flak

SP insiders concede that barring Akhilesh’s robust assertions in media interactions of his commitment to PDA welfare, there is little in terms of visible grassroots mobilisation of backward castes (beyond the Yadavs), Dalits and Muslims that the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister has achieved so far.

On the contrary, senior SP leaders told The Federal that the past two months have witnessed a widening of the trust deficit between their party and the Dalits while Akhilesh’s recent political moves have also made the SP’s traditional vote bank of Muslims and its more recently minted non-Yadav OBC support base restive.

The rainbow coalition of OBC leaders and caste-based parties that Akhilesh had built in late 2021 had begun to dwindle within months of the SP’s 2022 assembly poll defeat despite the party’s tally in the 403-member Vidhan Sabha rising to 111 MLAs from the 47 MLAs it had in 2017.

Desertions from SP

Ominous signs of fissures in the PDA plank had come with Nonia leader Dara Singh Chauhan’s return to the BJP within months of winning the 2022 polls on SP ticket and later with SP ally OP Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) joining the NDA.

An even bigger setback came this January with RLD chief and Jat leader Jayant Chaudhary severing ties with the SP to join the NDA after the Narendra Modi government announced its decision to honour his late grandfather, former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, with the Bharat Ratna.

While these may have been developments that Akhilesh had little control over, what followed next, SP leaders agree, were blunders of Akhilesh’s own making.

Rajya Sabha fiasco

The SP’s pick of candidates for three Rajya Sabha berths that were up for election in Uttar Pradesh last month were, per former party leader Swami Prasad Maurya, Akhilesh’s “biggest betrayal of PDA”. For the three seats that the SP had hoped to win, Akhilesh picked two upper castes – actor and SP leader Jaya Bachchan and former bureaucrat Alok Ranjan – and a Dalit, Ramjilal Suman.

Ranjan lost the polls due to cross-voting by nearly a dozen SP MLAs who promptly defected to the BJP but not before Akhilesh got publicly slammed by Maurya and SP ally, Apna Dal (K) leader Pallavi Patel, for ignoring OBCs and Muslims in the candidate selection process.

“Akhilesh’s candidates for the Rajya Sabha polls disappointed everyone who had warmed up to the party due to the PDA pitch... There were three seats and the SP could have easily picked one candidate each from the OBC, Dalit and Muslim community to show that it will walk the talk on PDA. I could not keep quiet at this betrayal and so I resigned from all party posts in the hope that it would force Akhilesh to reconsider his decision but I was wrong,” Maurya, who later quit the SP and formed a new outfit, Rashtriya Shoshit Samaj Party, told The Federal.

Lessons not learnt

What shocked SP leaders more, however, is Akhilesh’s “failure to course-correct” despite these mounting setbacks. Party insiders glumly admit that there is a “wide gulf” between Akhilesh’s actions and his talk of PDA empowerment and this is increasingly “becoming apparent” in both, the party’s chief’s style of functioning and his choice of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

“Our party president thinks loud rhetoric without any visible action will be sufficient to consolidate PDA in the election,” a senior SP leader said. The leader, a former two-term MP, rued that the “loss of SBSP, RLD and people like Dara Singh Chauhan and Swami Prasad Maurya should have forced Akhilesh to aggressively court the caste groups these outfits and leaders represented while, by now, we should have been able to present a clear agenda for Dalits and Muslims too but none of this has happened”.

More losses

Earlier this week, the SP, which is contesting the upcoming polls in alliance with an organisationally and financially crippled Congress party, also lost its last remaining ally from the 2022 assembly elections; Krishna Patel and Sirathu MLA Pallavi Patel’s Apna Dal (K).

The Apna Dal (K), which has pockets of influence across several Kurmi-dominated Lok Sabha constituencies of eastern Uttar Pradesh, had been annoyed with Akhilesh since the February Rajya Sabha polls. The party has now tied up with Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM; an alliance that is expected to damage the SP’s prospects since it would be geared towards the same OBC and Muslim electorate that Akhilesh wanted to woo with his PDA pitch.

Candidate selection

Party sources say Akhilesh’s “failure to directly address concerns of the Muslims, woo Dalits and address concerns of SP’s allies” is undermining the PDA plank and that the candidate selection process for the Lok Sabha polls has left the SP cadre “in complete confusion”.

Over the past fortnight, there have been multiple instances wherein the SP has announced Lok Sabha candidates only to replace them shortly thereafter. Worse, in the case of SP strongholds such as Moradabad and Rampur, both with a formidable Muslim population, the party’s choice of candidates has triggered a virtual revolt within the ranks.

Rampur blunder

In Rampur, the bastion of jailed SP co-founder Azam Khan, the party fielded Muhibullah Nadvi, a cleric of Delhi’s Parliament Street mosque, moments before the nomination process was to conclude. Sources said Khan, who is lodged in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur jail, had urged Akhilesh to either contest from Rampur or else field his close aide, Asim Raja, from the seat.

Raja, who had lost the 2022 Rampur bypoll to the BJP’s Ghanshyam Lodhi (he is in the fray again) amid allegations of rigging, told The Federal that he was asked by the SP to file his nomination from the seat but when he went to do so, he was informed that the party has fielded Nadvi instead.

“Everyone is shocked... I do not know what compulsions drove the leadership to field someone whose only association with Rampur is that he was born in a village in Suar (an assembly segment within Rampur Lok Sabha)... Nobody here knows him (Nadvi); we have surrendered the seat to the BJP even before the campaign gained momentum,” Raja said. Sources say Khan, whose writ runs large in Rampur, has refused to endorse Nadvi despite Akhilesh’s pleas.

Moradabad mess

In neighbouring Moradabad, the unrest within the party and its Muslim support base is, ironically, being blamed on Akhilesh “surrendering to Azam Khan” by benching the party’s sitting MP from the seat, Dr ST Hasan.

The party had officially declared Hasan as its Moradabad candidate but dropped him at the last minute, after Akhilesh met Khan at the Sitapur jail. The SP has now fielded former Bijnor MLA Ruchi Veera, who had previously been expelled from the party in 2015 and subsequently had brief stints with Mayawati’s BSP and the BJP, from Moradabad.

Hasan, who had contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Moradabad as a joint candidate of the then SP-BSP alliance and defeated the BJP’s Sarvesh Kumar Singh by over 98,000 votes, has publicly declared that he would not campaign for Veera. Hasan told The Federal that “giving the ticket to Veera is an injustice not just to me but to the voters of Moradabad” and that the manner in which the party declared his candidature and then withdrew it to field Veera had left him “feeling humiliated”. The move, Hasan said, would “send a very wrong signal to Muslims who were looking up to the SP to fight the BJP’s oppression.”

Upsetting Dalits

If the Pichhda and Alpsankhyak forks of the SP’s PDA trident have been blunted by these inexplicable moves of Akhilesh, the third fork, Dalits, say observers “has been destroyed even before it could form fully”.

With Mayawati’s BSP emasculated electorally and showing no signs of revival, Akhilesh had hoped to corner a sizeable chunk of the state’s over 20 per cent Dalit votes by talking up rising incidents of atrocities against the community under the BJP’s double-engine ‘sarkar’ at the Centre and in Lucknow.

The SP chief’s refusal to bring rising Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad’s Azad Samaj Party (ASP) into the SP-Congress alliance and his failure to make timely interventions on issues concerning the community has, however, cast a long shadow on those aspirations.

Angry Azad

Azad told The Federal that he was willing to settle for just two seats – Nagina and Bijnor – for the ASP in the seat-sharing pact with the SP but “after promising to grant us these seats, Akhilesh did not even show the courtesy of telling us that he will not be able to accommodate our party in the alliance... he just declared candidates for these seats”.

Now contesting as an ASP candidate from Nagina, Azad said “my fight is against the BJP but it is also my duty to tell the Dalits that they cannot trust even one word of what Akhilesh says”.

“Akhilesh talks about PDA but what is the reality of his PDA... senior backward caste leaders have left him, he left Azam Khan languishing in jail and remembers him only when elections come, he could not even find time to visit the family of Barq saheb (Sambhal MP Shafiqur Rehman Barq, who passed away last month) and when Mukhtar Ansari died under mysterious circumstances, Akhilesh made perfunctory remarks on law and order in the state but could not even take Mukhtar Ansari’s name once; as for Dalits, everyone knows what the SP did to Mayawati and why it has now ditched our Azad Samaj Party... this is Akhilesh’s PDA; pure 100 per cent electoral jumla,” Azad added.