If all is well that ends well, then all’s not well with Akhilesh Yadav. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister has had to capitulate on two key decisions he took recently. He had to reinstate senior Samajwadi Party leader Shivpal Yadav in the Cabinet, and he had to also restore another sacked Minister, Gayatri Prajapati.
In return he got nothing, not even the State party chief’s post, which was taken from him and given to Shivpal Yadav. The Tipu looks more like a wimp than a sultan.
This is the compromise formula that SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav worked out and enforced on the warring players. It came after the Chief Minister is supposed to have been assured that he would have a major say in ticket distribution for the 2017 Assembly election.
The problem is twofold. The first is that an assurance is, well an assurance – not a certainty. The second is that, as party chief, Shivpal Yadav will aggressively push for his candidates. He will not bother about the niceties of past promises. Both he and Akhilesh realise that, if they wish to control affairs post-election, they need their camp followers in place.
There is a second loser in the tussle: Mulayam Singh Yadav himself. It’s true he has stamped his authority by brokering a compromise between the feuding uncle-nephew. But he had to admit his own error in stripping Akhilesh Yadav of the party chief’s chief without discussing with the latter.
Moreover, perhaps for the first time, a senior party leader and his cousin, Ram Gopal Yadav, openly blamed the supremo for the fiasco. This temerity does no good to the patriarch’s image. He has ended up looking like a bumbler, unsure anymore of his touch.
For now, Mulayam Singh Yadav may have just averted a major division in the party. He played the emotional card, saying the party will not split till he is alive. But the issue hasn’t been settled for good. The prevailing ‘unity’ is a farce.
Both Akhilesh Yadav and Shivpal Yadav continue to nurture deep distrust of each other. This will play out in the months to come, even if it remains muted until before the election. The schism is too deep to be papered over.
In families across the world, the ‘outsider’ gets the flak when members fall out with one another. Here too, ‘outsider’ Amar Singh has been placed in the dock. He is supposed to have played the villain, joining hands with the Shivpal Yadav-led camp to belittle the Chief Minister.
A bitter Akhilesh Yadav has now said he would never ever call this outsider, his ‘uncle’ – a term he had endearingly used for Amar Singh. And Ram Gopal Yadav, never among Amar Singh’s admirers, will endorse it.
But the outsider says he is as much an insider as any of the ruling Yadav family. He says he is a Mulayamwadi. And being that, he cannot but be a family insider. He says he has seen Akhilesh Yadav grow before his eyes. There’s no denying that.
He also says that even if Akhilesh Yadav were to hit him, he would be only concerned about the former’s well-being. This can be taken with a pinch of salt, since such saintly feelings don’t fit Amar Singh’s profile.
But let’s be fair to Amar Singh, the consummate deal-maker and networker. He is to the Samajwadi Party-outside world link what Shivpal Yadav is to the party’s internal structure. Assuming he isplotting to eat into the vitals of the party from within, he cannotsucceed without the ingredient of a fault line. He can at best be accused of being an exploiter, not an instigator of division.
Also, Amar Singh had been out of the party for the last few years, during which time too, the Akhilesh Yadav-Shivpal Yadav tussle for supremacy in both Government and party had been evident.
Amar Singh or no Amar Singh, the uncle and the nephew have nothing in common except for the party and the family they belong to. The uncle is the quintessential organisation man and a political schemer. He built the party alongside ‘Netaji’, braving considerable odds.
The nephew is younger, and he got a functional entity and the chief ministership on a platter. He cannot play his uncle’s games because he does not know how to, not because he doesn’t want to. Some tricks have are learned on the streets.
Today, the Samajwadi Party is faced with the challenge of re-election. It’s fractured as never before. Does it require the craftiness of a Shivpal Yadav to save it? Or does it need the impetuosity of an Akhilesh Yadav to steer it ahead? These are the questions.