SP story may have a sequel
Shivpal’s relationship with Akhilesh started to sour about two years ago.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has said he would support his uncle and Samajwadi Party state president Shivpal Yadav. Speaking to reporters in Lucknow on Saturday, Yadav also said there was “no rift” in the party. “I have congratulated him (Shivpal Yadav) on being the Uttar Pradesh chief of the Samajwadi Party and have asked all the party workers to congratulate him,” Akhilesh said.
Akhilesh had earlier said that he felt “very sad” when he was replaced with Shivpal as the state party chief by his father and party president Mulayam Singh Yadav. He had also demanded that he be given a say in the ticket distribution for the 2017 Assembly elections. Mulayam, this is to be noted, met both Akhilesh and Shivpal on Friday to work out a truce between them. Asked about his demand on ticket distribution, Akhilesh said on Saturday, “It’s going to be my examination. I will certainly say that much to the national president.” The foundation stones have been shaken rather badly. The cracks in the wall are being papered over and may even be given a fresh coat of paint but despite all this, the Samajwadi edifice is crumbling. The latest fight in Uttar Pradesh’s ruling family is not helping the Samajwadi Party.
The five-day drama that began on Monday with the sacking of two ministers, Gayatri Prajapati and Raj Kishore Singh, continued on Tuesday with the sacking of UP chief secretary Deepak Singhal and finally snowballed into a crisis when SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav sacked Akhilesh Yadav from the post of the SP’s state president.
The same night, Akhilesh Yadav retaliated by stripping his uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav of key portfolios like PWD, revenue, irrigation and cooperative. Shivpal and his wife Sarla and son Aditya resigned from all posts they held in the party and the government and the SP was on the boil.
The family and party were already falling apart when Prof Ram Gopal Yadav, a cousin of Mulayam Singh Yadav, addressed a press conference in Lucknow and blamed Amar Singh for the crisis. Ram Gopal Yadav went off to his village Sefai after talking to the media, leaving the party in turmoil.
The crisis in the party apparently began with the sacking of Prajapati from the council of ministers. Prajapati is known to be an acolyte of Mulayam’s second wife Sadhana and her son Prateek. Prajapati’s sacking apparently led to the problems in the family. UP Chief Secretary Deepak Singhal, on the other hand, was known as a Shivpal Yadav loyalist and had attended a party thrown by Amar Singh in Delhi. His unceremonious removal trig- gered another family crisis.
As the situation tumbled out of control, Mulayam summoned Shivpal and Akhilesh to Delhi but the latter refused to take his calls which led to his removal from the state president’s post. “This is not a case of power play but family bickering, which is impacting the party. Akhilesh has a problem with his stepmother, stepbrother and all those who are close to them. The feelings are mutual. Shivpal shares a good equation with Amar Singh, while Ram Gopal Yadav cannot accept Amar Singh’s return to the party fold. Therefore, Ram Gopal is on the same page as Akhilesh where Amar Singh is concerned. It is these complicated relationships that are giving rise to this turmoil,” said an insider.
Shivpal’s relationship with Akhilesh started to sour about two years ago when the Chief Minister stopped taking advice from his uncle and began depending on his non-political friends and bureaucrats. Shivpal, on several occasions, confided to party leaders that his nephew did not heed his advice and did not give him due importance. The tension in the relationship reached a flashpoint in June when Mulayam asked Shivpal to announce the merger of Qaumi Ekta Dal into the SP and Akhilesh, four days later, forced the decision to be reversed. The relationship became so strained that Akhilesh would not even entertain ministers and legislators who shared a rapport with Shivpal. “We are still wary of getting re-nominated for the Assembly polls because Akhilesh has told us to ‘go to chacha’ whenever we have met him with some work. Mulayam Singh Yadav may have forced a temporary truce, but things are bound to come to a head again, perhaps when tickets are finalised by the party,” said an SP MLA. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which was the only national party that had till now shied away from social media claiming that it was a party that believed in working on the ground, has now woken up to the benefits of Twitter and Facebook.
Last week, BSP leaders took to Twitter in a big way during the 11 September rally of party chief Mayawati in Saharanpur. They were successfully able to trend #MayawatinextUPCM and #chaloSaharanpur for hours. The party has now started focusing on increasing its footprints on social media and is in the process of appointing a special team that will focus on social media.
“Initially, Behenji (Mayawati) was averse to focusing our time and energy on social media, but now she has opened up to the idea and after her mega rally was held at Saharanpur, she was very happy when we told her that people were talking about it so much on Facebook and Twitter. Our party workers are new to Twitter and hence we faced some problems. Many of the intended tweets and pictures of the rally were not uploaded or else we would have done even better,” a party functionary, requesting anonymity, said.
Keeping the Uttar Pradesh elections in mind, the party has made some new Twitter handles, including @BSPUP2017, whose aim, as given in the bio, reads thus: “The only wish is to see Bahen Mayawati Ji as next UP CM in 2017 n aim is to achieve our dream. Let’s come together n join hands and make this a reality in Poll.”
The official handle of the party, @BSP4India, has not tweeted anything post February 2014, but it was the newly created @ BSPUP2017 that contributed in trending the hashtag #MayawatinextUPCM. This handle is managed by a special team that tweets and retweets news and views related to UP elections. The handle follows more than 50 journalists on Twitter and according to party insiders, the BSP will now also increase its interaction with journalists, both offline and online.
“We have among the worst presence on social media, which has come as an impediment when we have tried to take the fight to the opposition, which is an expert in using the media to malign us. Apart from social media, we are also going to increase our interaction with journalists, especially in Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi. In these times, politics is all about perception,” the party functionary said.
According to party leaders, the top leadership of the party, albeit a bit late, has realised that the penetration of internet and smartphones can be used to reach out to the voters. “Earlier, very few from our core vote bank had phones and the presence of smartphones was almost negligible, but that has changed in the past 2-3 years and now everyone is present on Facebook, if not Twitter, and this has been the factor behind our surge towards social media,” a Lucknow-based party functionary said.