With the first phase a fortnight away, the Akhilesh Yadav campaign is on a roll, ready to meet the Yogi-Modi juggernaut with its own brand of development-cum-Mandal politics wrapped in some spicy contemporary rhetoric.
New Delhi: The Uttar Pradesh elections are fast turning into an Akhilesh Yadav show. His daily press conferences at 1 pm set the poll narrative, as he highlights a new issue each day, or welcomes a new defector from the BJP. The Bicycle Chief’s trademark deadpan delivery as he scores a political point over his opponent is given away when he breaks into a mischievous smile immediately afterwards. Ensuring he has a captive audience, Akhilesh often breaks the presser to play his latest campaign song and then resumes the questions. There is some banter, there is also some calling out—if the questions seem a tad pro establishment. When a mainstream channel known for its pro BJP leanings published a poll survey showing the opposition in a poor light, Akhilesh quipped saying, “You should multiply the seats allotted by this channel to Asaduddin Owaisi by two to get the real estimate”; and when told about the estimate for SP he said, “multiply that number by three”! When the BJP poached his sister-in-law Aparna Yadav, he shrugged it off with a “she is propagating the Samajwadi Party culture in the BJP”. He has brought back fun into the very polarised and somewhat vicious politics of the Hindi heartland. There is also a confidence and a certain swag that was missing during the 2017 polls.
Six months ago, most had predicted that the BJP would sweep the elections. There was a buzz in Lucknow that the SP chief hadn’t even stepped out of his office; the BJP rumour mill claimed he was too busy playing video games. The SP chief was indeed busy, but instead of playing games, he was doing his homework, putting the nuts and bolts of his campaign in place. He had spent the last five years analysing the reasons for his loss in 2012 and shortlisted three main issues. The first was the ill-fated alliance with the Congress, where he gave the national party as many as 105 seats. The Congress could win only seven and ended up dragging the SP total down to 47 as well. The second of course was the feud within his family as he wrested control of his party from his father Mulayam Singh Yadav and uncle Shivpal Yadav. The third was his campaign itself. “He spent too much time talking about development and jobs when the other side swayed the electorate with their talk of shamshan ghats and kabarstans” said a party insider. Akhilesh then realised that while development was essential, you also need an emotional issue to sway the voters. That emotional glue was missing from his campaign.
India votes largely around two faultlines, caste and religion. As far as the latter is concerned, the BJP is already ahead of the game with its 80:20 calculations. As Rajeev Gowda (Congress leader) once commented on my show, “The Roundtable” on Newsx, “their user name is development but their password is Hindutva”. So Akhilesh decided (wisely) that unlike Rahul Gandhi he was not going to waste time taking the BJP on its own turf. In the initial phase of the campaign, he invoked Jinnah to communicate to the minorities that he had not forgotten them. This was important because AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi had just announced that he would be fielding candidates in Uttar Pradesh targeting the Muslim vote. So the Samajwadi Party had to send a signal that it was not abandoning the minorities. As far as the Hindu vote is concerned, Akhilesh maintained that he was a Krishna bhakt, that religion was not a single party’s domain. He then let the matter rest there, instead of raising the pitch on that debate and countering every provocative statement issued by the other side.
To enlarge the Samajwadi Party’s vote base from the traditional Muslim-Yadav (MY) combination he reached out to other caste and community leaders. This was something he had been working on well before the polls were announced, and by end September most of these alliances were in place. Some like O.P. Rajbhar joined him as early as September, others like Swami Prasad Maurya followed later. On poll eve he had a rainbow coalition in place and the battle for UP became one of Kamandal Vs Mandal.
It’s not as if the BJP does not play caste politics despite Veer Savarkar propagating the idea of a casteless Hindu. Prime Minister Narendra Modi often talks about his OBC credentials. He brought that up during the 2014 campaign when Priyanka Vadra Gandhi accused him of playing “neech politics”. By neech, she meant petty as she was reacting to what Modi had said about her father, the late Rajiv Gandhi. But via a smart sleight of hand, Modi interpreted “neech” as low born and commented that she was taking a dig at his being an OBC. That interpretation went viral and worked against the Congress. Even as recently as August 2020, when Modi reshuffled his Council of Ministers, he included 28 OBCs and for perhaps the first time the press release of the new council had their castes added alongside. Yet this did not stop Maurya, Saini and others from leaving the BJP.
The SP has not abandoned its development plank, for these are elections that are being fought in a Covid continuous world, where price hike and unemployment have hit every household. Not to mention the despair and deaths caused by the lethal second wave. Lack of governance is an issue, but with the BJP taking credit for every development project in the state, Akhilesh has to work hard to claim those inaugurated by him. He has a degree in civil engineering and is passionate about the works undertaken by him, be it the expressways, the metros or the renovation of the Gomti river waterfront. He did not just okay the projects on paper, but pored over the nuts and bolts of each one. He will rattle off the architectural design of the Lucknow-Agra expressway, he knows all the villages that are connected to it and at what point, how clearances were stalled by the environment ministry and solutions found. The Lucknow metro was his initiative as was the Gomti Riverfront makeover. The latter ran into trouble, with the Yogi government finding flaws in the project and alleging corruption, but Akhilesh retorted that “perhaps the one mistake I made was to make it better than the Sabarmati River Front”. During his time the SP had also announced a pension scheme which included giving two saris to women of BPL families. Akhilesh changed this to Rs 500 a month stating that perhaps it was best to leave it to the women to buy their own sari choices, or else spend the money elsewhere. As he said, how can we decide what colour they want? Definitely a pragmatic politician.
Unfortunately for him, the first few years of his chief ministership (2012 to 2017) were hijacked by his father and uncles. It was said that the state of UP had four and a half chief ministers, with Akhilesh being reduced to just half. It is well known that Mulayam Singh Yadav was not very keen to give his son the CM’s chair, but since the 2012 polls were won due to the wave created by Akhilesh’s kranti rath, there was a buzz around his name. Mulayam Singh even told his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav that he wanted to be CM for a fourth term to beat his bete-noir Mayawati’s track record. “CMs record ke liye nahin banaye jaate (CMs are not made to create statistics)”, retorted the other Yadav as he pushed his nephew’s candidature forward. Initially, Akhilesh tried his best to change the outlook of his party towards a more progressive makeover. When he kept his poll promise and distributed 18 lakh laptops amongst the youths, he had set his father’s picture as the screensaver. That did not go down well with “Netaji” (as Mulayam is known). It was only during the last year of his chief ministership that Akhilesh realised that he had to wrest control of the narrative and began pushing his pet projects. It wasn’t enough to leave his mark, but it did give him enough time to give the people of UP a taste of his governance model. It was also a time when Betaji became a Netaji.
With the first phase a fortnight away, the Akhilesh Yadav campaign is on a roll, ready to meet the Yogi-Modi juggernaut with its own brand of development-cum-Mandal politics wrapped in some spicy contemporary rhetoric. So if Yogi Adityanath claims UP Mein Sab Ba (UP has everything), Akhilesh Yadav counters with a UP Mein Ka Ba (What is there in Yogi’s UP)—with due apologies to Ravi Kishan and Neha Rathore. Well, it’s poll season and let’s see which lyrics click with the voter.