For Akhilesh Yadav and SP, more political challenges have just begun

His bid to unseat Yogi Adityanath and the BJP from power may have come a cropper but Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has made it clear that he won’t be doubling back to Delhi anytime soon. Instead, the newly elected MLA from Karhal, who failed to steer the SP’s multi-party coalition to power in UP despite an impressive 10 percent surge in his party’s vote share, will stick to Lucknow politics to bolster his recently acquired image of Chief Minister-designate Yogi Adityanath’s principal challenger in the state.

Yadav resigned as the Lok Sabha MP from Azamgarh, on March 22, and is now set to be the Leader of Opposition in UP Assembly. However, as the SP chief moves forward in his new political role, the challenges that lie ahead of him are expected to be much more daunting than the high-stakes electoral battle he commandeered till a fortnight ago.

With Adityanath set to return as UP CM for a second consecutive term and the BJP only slightly bruised in the Assembly polls (its seat tally went down to 255 from the 312 it had won in 2017 but saw a 1.62 per cent hike in its vote share), it is expected that Yadav and his party will be up against a regime that is distinctly more belligerent than its previous avatar.

The UP mandate is already being viewed by the BJP brass as a resounding endorsement of Adityanath’s rabidly communal and unapologetically muscular politics. It is expected that the CM-designate, once he assumes office and let’s loose his bulldozer politics, will give no quarter to Yadav, his SP and its many allies. Similarly, Yogi’s administration apparatus too can be expected to be more imperious, abrasive and unforgiving towards its critics than it was during the last five years. Yadav’s task as the leader of Opposition as well as the boss of his party is, thus, well cut out.

But, there’s arguably an even bigger challenge that the SP chief is likely to be up against in the near and foreseeable future. The UP poll results left no doubt that though the social engineering Yadav tried to master by aggressively wooing non-Yadav backward castes, non-Jatav Dalits and the Brahmins in his bid to pivot the SP to power paid rich dividends, also came way short of actually unseating the BJP.

Yadav would be in a state of denial if he did not realise that the BJP’s victory was as much a result of communal passions stirred up to a crescendo as it was of the wily politics of using populism to override personal travails of an electorate otherwise seething over price rise, joblessness, the stray cattle menace as well as affiliations voters, may have had with leaders of their communities that the SP had wooed over to its side.

Also read: EC data belies SP’s claims on ‘narrow margin wins for BJP’

It is a given that the BJP’s vote-winning cocktail of communal polarisation and populism will be poured down the electorate’s gullet with renewed fervour. The BJP will now be looking to reverse its losses of 2022 in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. SP insiders concede that the UP polls have also given the BJP a lead for 2024 on the social engineering that Yadav will likely want to pursue further.

Several SP leaders The Federal spoke to said they were certain that the BJP, emboldened by its victory and once again in control of various tools of intimidation and allurements, will seek to chip away at the SP’s ranks and also at the ideologically neutral, caste-based parties such as the SBSP, Mahan Dal, Janwadi Socialist Party or even the RLD that Yadav had allied with in the polls.

Yadav will not only need to keep his flock of SP lawmakers together but also ensure that his new found allies don’t get an excuse to turn their backs on him.

Fissures in the SP-led alliance have already begun to appear. Mahan Dal chief Keshav Dev Maurya has accused the SP of underutilising his party in the polls and instead banking on those members of the Maurya community who could not even win their own seat.

Dev’s swipe was clearly aimed at Swami Prasad Maurya, who defected from the BJP to the SP ahead of the polls and was projected as the SP’s counter to the saffron party’s tallest Koeri community face – Keshav Prasad Maurya.

However, despite the brouhaha over the ‘prize catch’ that Swami Prasad was for the SP, he lost the polls from the Fazilnagar constituency.

Keshav Dev Maurya has made it known that he isn’t averse to walking away from the SP, if his party isn’t shown due respect. Though Dev’s political stature and ability to swing votes may not match that of Swami Prasad, it would make for bad optics for Yadav if the Mahan Dal walks away hurling strident criticisms at the SP.

Also read: Why is BJP winning in UP despite anti-incumbency?

The near seven per cent Maurya-Koeri vote of UP, Samajwadi sources claim, had split in this election between the BJP and the SP after having consolidated behind the saffron party in the previous election. This was evident in the defeat of both Swami Prasad of the SP and former deputy CM Keshav Prasad of the BJP from Fazilnagar and Sirathu respectively. However, SP insiders claim that by keeping both Swami Prasad and Keshav Dev close, Yadav could ensure that the Maurya vote shifts in greater volume to the SP.

A similar challenge may come SP’s way if Yadav fails to keep SBSP chief and Zahoorabad MLA Om Prakash Rajbhar in good humour.

Rajbhar, who commands significant clout over his community in eastern UP, played a key role in helping SP win big across Purvanchal districts such as Ghazipur, Mau and others.

However, Rajbhar’s commitments to senior alliance partners have always been fickle. He was part of the NDA but walked out of it in 2019 due to differences with Adityanath. The SBSP chief recently met Union Home Minister Amit Shah setting off rumours that he may be contemplating another somersault.

Though Rajbhar denied such a possibility, SP sources admit keeping him within the alliance will be a real test for Yadav.

Many in the SP agree that Yadav needs to go all out to expand the party’s social base. Key to such a plan would be to retain caste leaders Yadav won over before the elections, several of whom may now be restive as the alliance failed to come to power .

A seemingly radical but electorally prudent move may be for Yadav to field Swami Prasad Maurya or some other non-Yadav backward caste leader, or even a Dalit, in the Lok Sabha bypoll that will now be held for the Azamgarh seat vacated by the SP chief. There is also some talk within the SP of likely political gains of appointing Swami Prasad as the party’s state unit chief.

Similarly, with 125 Assembly seats now in the SP-fold as well a strong presence of the party in local bodies across the state, Yadav may consider using the ensuing MLC elections and the Rajya Sabha elections to back electorally formidable community leaders from within the party fold as well as among its allies, such as Jayant Chaudhary, Keshav Dev, Krishna Patel and others instead of reserving these for members of his family.

The key allegations that the BJP routinely hurls at the SP are that prime posts – organisational or of MPs, MLAs, MLCs – are reserved either for the Yadav family or members of their community or for the Muslims. Yadav may want to use the Rajya Sabha and MLC polls as well as an organisational rejig to dent this accusation. Since Azamgarh holds much symbolic significance for the SP’s first family, the temptation for Yadav to field his wife, Dimple Yadav, or one of his cousins may be understandable.

However, if Yadav’s resists this temptation and gives ensures the victory of an outsider to the family and one who belongs to a caste other than Yadav’s own, the SP may send the right social message to the new constituency of voters it is trying to attract.

The SP’s traditional social base among Muslims and Yadavs had former CM Mulayam Singh Yadav in good stead. Holding on to it is a necessity for the SP chief but the electoral limitations of this combination have become all too clear since 2014 when the BJP began courting non-Yadav OBCs, non-Jatav Dalits along with its traditional base of forward caste voters.

Another key challenge for Yadav is to strengthen his own organisation and also change his own leadership style. The electoral might of the BJP, as is repeatedly said and demonstrated, is not solely on account of the appeal of its top leadership but also, in no small measure, a consequence of the strong network of grassroots workers that the saffron parivar, with the RSS as its biggest force multiplier, has succeeded in nurturing.

The SP, as the recent polls showed, may have a cadre but its discipline, numerical strength and electoral commitment pales in comparison to the BJP’s. Across large parts of western and central UP, SP insiders claim, the party’s booth management during the polls failed because of a dearth of dedicated cadre. A major cause of this disconnect, a senior SP leader told The Federal, was Yadav’s proclivity to centralise control instead of following his father’s example of divesting key responsibilities to trusted aides down the party hierarchy.

“Unlike Netaji (as Mulayam is popularly called), Akhilesh wants to have direct control of everything. The problem gets complicated further with Akhilesh’s frequent absence from Lucknow and his long spells of inactivity. In a large state like UP, you can’t wake up six months before the polls and hope to unseat a rival as strong as the BJP, particularly when you have done little to build the organisation at the grassroots over the past five years. Netaji had lieutenants like Azam Khan, Beni Prasad Verma, Amar Singh, Rewati Raman Singh, Janeshwar Mishra, Mata Prasad Pandey besides Shivpal Yadav and Ramgopal Yadav who could cover all bases – castes, communities, regions, finances, cadre, alliances, etc. Akhilesh has no one and actually he likes it this way; he wants to do everything himself so that the spotlight is always on him… this doesn’t work,” said a senior SP leader.

It is a fact that Yadav had snoozed through a better part of Yogi’s last term in office. He did wake up for a few months during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls that he contested in an unseemly and unrewarding alliance with arch-rival Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party but after the SP’s poor five-seat victory, he went into a stupor again. Through the COVID pandemic and or even the Hathras gangrape before it, Yadav was neither seen nor heard. It was only around October 2021 that he finally woke up to wage his electoral battle against the BJP.

Of course, Yadav must be given credit for breathing enough life into his languid party in the period between October 2021 and February 2022 to ensure that the SP’s seats went up from 47 of 2017 to 111 in the current polls. Yet, this achievement also requires questions to be asked of the SP chief on whether the party would have performed better – returned to power even – if he had, like Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Yogi or any other BJP member in leadership positions, acted like a full-time politician all along.

SP sources say that in many ways Yadav suffers from the same political infirmities that the Gandhi siblings – Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra – are afflicted with.

“He likes his trips abroad just like Rahul and, like the Gandhis, he has a limited coterie of people, mostly political greenhorns, who he trusts blindly. He’ll wake up just before elections, do whirlwind tours across the state, make rousing speeches. None of these have served the Gandhis well and they’ll be the same for Akhilesh. He has to be based in Lucknow, he needs to constantly travel across the state and be visible and accessible to his workers like his father was,” said a senior SP leader, who has worked closely with Mulayam but, since 2017, has largely been confined by Akhilesh to a district in Purvanchal.

SP insiders say it is due to these inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in Yadav’s politics that have led to the SP’s footprint shrinking even in the state’s Yadav-belt across the Etah, Mainpuri, Etawah and Kannauj districts. The BJP swept this region in the recent Assembly polls though Yadav was in the fray from Karhal in Mainpuri. Part of this rout, many within the SP’s old guard say, was Yadav’s inability to let go of his personal differences with uncle Shivpal Yadav.

Shivpal had had a public falling out with Akhilesh ahead of the 2017 polls and then gone on to float his own breakaway faction of the party. Yadav patched up with his uncle ahead of the recent polls and Shivpal successfully won his Jaswantnagar seat. However, Yadav failed to utilise Shivpal, who still has considerable clout over the party cadre in the Etah-Mainpuri belt, during the polls to campaign beyond Jaswantnagar.

Also read: Akhilesh puts up a brave face, says ‘fall of BJP will continue’

Some in the SP believe that losing the polls was also a blessing in disguise for Yadav.

“He now knows the high price he will have to pay if he continues to function way he does…he needs to be a team player, delegate responsibility, be on the field constantly. Since we lost the polls, it’s unlikely that the more unruly elements within the party will run amok (the SP is accused by the BJP of condoning gooda Raj when in power) as they may have if we had won but Yadav will still need to keep such leaders under check… There are many lessons he can learn from this defeat and come out stronger in 2024 and 2027, but he needs to be awake to all this and willing to change his ways,” said a party veteran.

Clearly, for Yadav, the road ahead presents more challenges than the one he just traversed. The end of the 2022 poll battle also marks the beginning of Yadav’s battle to retain the ground he has now won – and to expand it further. Is he ready?