Save Samajwadi campaign: Akhilesh to hit the streets to keep flock together

With the Bharatiya Janata Party poaching its legislators and unity in the party looking like a distant dream, Akhilesh Yadav is set to embark on a campaign in an attempt to breathe fresh life into the Samajwadi Party.

The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s ‘Desh bachaao, desh banaao’ agitation, which will target the BJP governments in the state and the Centre, will begin from Faizabad on 9 August. The 75 district units of the party are also expected to stage protests.

The date was picked carefully to coincide with the Quit India Movement that began on 8 August 1942.

The campaign

In Faizabad, Akhilesh is scheduled to garland the statue of a freedom fighter before launching a broadside against the state government - mainly against the total breakdown of law and order.

It is not yet clear if the former chief minister would also visit the makeshift Ram temple at Ayodhya, which his father had scrupulously avoided. So far, the party’s intellectual cell member Chandrashekhar Pandey has insisted that Akhilesh won’t be going to the temple.

While some reports said that the protests will be held at all district headquarters beginning Wednesday, Pandey said no schedule had been finalised yet and that, to begin with, the protests would be held at all divisional headquarters.

According to sources, the party is unlikely to go all out against the BJP fearing a backlash against Ram Gopal Yadav in the jailed Noida engineer Yadav Singh corruption case.

Brewing trouble

But the politicking doesn't end there.

On the eve of Akhilesh’s programme, Mulayam Singh Yadav dealt his son a blow by replacing four members of Lohia Trust, replacing them with Shivpal Yadav’s loyalists. Those sacked included Ram Govind Chaudhary, Ahmed Hasan, Usha Verma and Ashok Shakya. Chaudhary is Leader of Opposition in Vidhan Sabha.

Mulayam is now the patron of the party while Akhilesh is its national president. The former SP chief, however, is president of the Lohia Trust. Shivpal, Akhilesh, Ramgopal Yadav and Azam Khan are among the members.

Mulayam’s action on Tuesday may be dismissed by the faction led by his son as illegal, but it accentuates differences in the family and makes survival of the party much more difficult.

Factional interests

Akhilesh is also facing desertions with three party MLCs quitting to join the BJP. He attacked the BJP for luring away its legislators and said it was afraid of facing the electorate. Calling it a worst form of political corruption Akhilesh said, “We have seen it in Bihar and Gujarat and now it is in UP.”

Two MLCs - Bukkal Nawab and Yashwant Singh - resigned on 29 July - the day BJP national president Amit Shah arrived in Lucknow.

The third, Sarojini Agarwal, whose tenure was to end in 2022, quit the party on 4 August 4. She said she was resigning as Mulayam had been marginalised in the party.

Bukkal Nawab resigned because “Mulayam was being insulted in the party”, while Yashwant Singh put in his papers that his resignation was over a comment made by Akhilesh on China.

All three SP law makers and Thakur Jaiveer Singh of the Bahujan Samaj Party were said to have vacated their seats to help Chief Minister Adityanath Yogi, Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Maurya and Dinesh Sharma to seek membership of the House.

Unable to hold his flock together, an upset Akhilesh said that those wanting to leave the party can go without offering any excuses. “That will enable me to identify my fair weather friends,” he said, adding that those leaving the party say that they were feeling suffocated in the party.

But desertions and factionalism have come as a dampener for Akhilesh’s bid to revive the party which could win only 47 seats in the 2014 assembly elections.