Mulayam had expelled his son and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and Ram Gopal Yadav from the party for alleged anti-party activities and the latter retaliated by terming it as unconstitutional.
Akhilesh Yadav retaliated by convening a meeting of party legislators and office bearers at his residence two hours before his father had convened a meeting of the legislators.
207 SP legislators turned up at the Chief Minister’s meeting on Saturday, while 22 were seen at Mulayam’s meeting, forcing the latter to go on the back foot. Senior SP leader Azam Khan played peace maker and took Akhilesh to Mulayam’s residence, where after an hour long meeting, the expulsion of Akhilesh and Ram Gopal Yadav was revoked.
Even after his expulsion was revoked, Ram Gopal Yadav remained firm on holding the emergency national convention of the party in Lucknow on Sunday.
The national convention could trigger a fresh crisis in the party if the mood is anything to go by. A faction loyal to Akhilesh is keen to appoint him as the working national president. The expulsion of the CM from his party— probably, the first in the history of Uttar Pradesh—had hurled the state into a political spin and the Samajwadi Party into a state of chaos.
Though there was no immediate threat to the Akhilesh Yadav government, which, in any case, is in the last few weeks of its tenure, the developments of the last few days have taken the sheen away from the Samajwadi campaign and have put a question mark on the future of the party. The events that led to the expulsion of Akhilesh Yadav from the Samajwadi Party began with his father announcing candidates for 325 Assembly seats.
The list did not include the names of three ministers known for their proximity to the Chief Minister. These ministers are Arvind Singh Gope, Ram Govind Chaudhary and Tej Narain Pandey (who had been expelled from the pasty last month).
A defiant Akhilesh, after rejecting the list of candidates finalised by his father, asked his supporters — including ministers and legislators — to contest elections on their own and use his face in the campaign. He also released a parallel list of 235 candidates and promised them his support. These candidates were asked to contest as independents now. His list did not include criminals like Ateeq Ahmad and Ansari brothers but did have a place for Manoj Paras, a rape accused.
The Chief Minister also struck off the names of seniors like Om Prakash Singh, Narad Rai and Shadab Fatima — all of whom are in the Shivpal camp. This meant that there would have been two SP candidates in every constituency — one from the Mulayam faction and the other from the Akhilesh faction and the Samajwadi Party which had been pompously claiming its return to power, would now fight itself in every Assembly segment. Posters of candidates with “Akhilesh Samarthak” (Akhilesh supporters) written boldly also sprang up all over Lucknow almost overnight, giving a clear indication of the things to come.
The final straw, however, came when Prof Ram Gopal Yadav convened an emergency meeting of the party’s national council on Friday with the obvious intention of anointing Akhilesh as the new national president and announcing action against Shivpal Yadav. Mulayam Singh tried to pre-empt the move by terming the meeting as “illegal” and expelling Akhilesh and Ram Gopal Yadav—a decision that he later retracted. According to party sources, the situation had been escalating since the past one fortnight when Mulayam was made to listen to some recorded conversations in which leaders close to Akhilesh were heard badmouthing the party president and other top leaders.
A leader close to Akhilesh said that the CM was being “pumped up” by a group of party leaders and bureaucrats. “These sycophants kept drilling into the Chief Minister’s head that the party existed because of him and his image was bigger than the party. Akhilesh naturally started believing all this and got carried away. What he forgot that even today, the SP is synonymous with Mulayam and not Akhilesh—particularly in the rural interiors,” the leader said.
Akhilesh, however, is yet to realise this.