Samajwadi Party: Free fall or slow decline?

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav looks vulnerable, as the aura of a leader who took on his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, his uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav and stepmother Sadhana Gupta has started to fade.

In his latest interview to The Hindu, Akhilesh said had it not been for the family feud, he would have never allied with the Congress. Political observers interpret this as an admission of the alliance’s inability to deliver the number of seats Akhilesh expected. As many as 45 Samajwadi Party legislators, denied tickets to accommodate the Congress, are contesting as rebels.

At the heart of the SP’s struggle to hold the seats it netted in 2012 is the perception that the government had pandered excessively to Yadavs and Muslims, ignoring other castes. UP’s villages are rampant with complaints of Yadavs using their clout to appropriate land illegally.

“First, they grazed their cattle on the land. Next, they built some structures. Then, they produced papers to claim ownership,” said Brijesh Singh, a Faizabad transporter, who claims nearly 31 acres of land his family owned in Majhabreta village were usurped by the Yadavs. When he went to file a complaint, the police advised him to resolve the issue amicably.

Sanjeev Jaiswal, who owns a grocery shop at Harchandpur, an Assembly constituency in the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat, said his Yadav customers often refused to pay their bills. “Each of them thinks Akhilesh Yadav resides in his heart,” said Jaiswal.

The situation was not vastly different in the towns. A teacher in a Lucknow college said, “I recall how much I was harassed by Yadav employees in my college for five years. I couldn’t bear the thought of living under an SP government again.” A bureaucrat in Lucknow said the SP-Congress alliance was not sufficiently propagated. “Some of my colleagues who wanted to vote for the SP did not find the cycle symbol on the machine, obviously because that seat had gone to the Congress. They had no idea about the seat arrangement. They voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),” he said.

SP partymen claimed while their votes migrated to the Congress smoothly, the reverse did not happen. “This is because the traditional upper caste voters of the Congress resent the SP,” a party source said. The Brahmin and Rajput voters in these seats the Congress had vacated for the SP said they had switched over to the BJP.

The last problem the SP had bargained for was a split in the Muslim vote. However, in several seats, the BSP is taking away the minority vote, particularly where it seems better placed to defeat the BJP. Mohammad Ismail Khan of the Isauli assembly constituency in Sultanpur, said, “The Congress has no votebase. The SP’s vote base of Yadavs looks shaky because some of them are voting for the BJP. The BSP’s Dalit vote is intact. If that weighs one quintal, five kg of Muslim votes is all that is needed to make it stronger.”

Criminal cases against two SP contestants, both sitting MLAs, have tarnished the party’s image irreparably. Gayatri Prajapati, who had defeated the Congress’s Ameeta Sinh in 2012, was implicated in the rape of a woman and an attempt to rape her minor daughter. The Supreme Court recently ordered the UP government to lodge a case against Prajapati. Arun Verma, contesting for a second term from Sultanpur Sadar, was accused in the gang rape of a 20-year-old in 2013. The woman was recently murdered. Akhilesh had campaigned for Prajapati in Amethi.