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LS polls 2024: Five members of SP’s first family in fray again
They include party chief Akhilesh Yadav from Kannauj, his wife Dimple Yadav from Mainpuri, his cousins Dharmendra Yadav, Akshay Yadav and Aditya Yadav from Azamgarh, Firozabad and Budaun seats respectively
Accusations of promoting dynastic politics notwithstanding, the 2024 polls are the second successive general election when again five members of the Samajwadi Party (SP)’s first Yadav family are in the fray. Not only this, these are the only five Yadavs which the party has fielded in Uttar Pradesh this Lok Sabha polls.
They include party chief Akhilesh Yadav from Kannauj, his wife Dimple Yadav from Mainpuri, his cousins Dharmendra Yadav, Akshay Yadav and Aditya Yadav from Azamgarh, Firozabad and Budaun seats respectively.
All these seats are considered SP bastion. The Yadav family members had won all these seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Significantly, there were only five seats that the SP had won that time.
However, they lost Kannauj, Firozabad and Budaun in 2019 when Akhilesh Yadav had won Azamgarh seat while SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav had emerged victorious from Mainpuri. In the last Lok Sabha polls too, the SP had won only five seats.
“It’s natural for a former or a sitting lawmaker to contest the next polls. Isn’t it? Where’s the problem,” asked a senior SP leader. Senior SP leader and party’s spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said: “The biggest Parivarvad is in the BJP.”
Akhilesh Yadav, too, on several occasions has termed the BJP the biggest ‘Parivarvadi’ party at public events and even on his social media handles. Moreover, this is the first election without the party patriarch the late Mulayam Singh Yadav.
M-Y factor: All the seats that the Yadavs are contesting have been traditionally their strongholds with a strong Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) vote bank.
PDA factor: Now that Akhilesh has attempted to scale up the M-Y factor to include the PDA (Pichhada, Dalit, Alpsankhyak--backward, Dalit and minorities) under his social engineering formula, the party assumes that it will add to the advantage on M-Y high-density seats.
INDIA alliance: The SP is now part of the INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc of the opposition parties for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The SP insiders feel that the alliance with the Congress will help the party consolidate votes for the victory of the candidates on the five seats--three of which the SP had lost with a low margin.
The SP has declared candidates on 59 seats so far for the 62 seats it is contesting. Of these 59 candidates, there are 29 OBC (24 non-Yadav OBCs and 5 Yadavs), 17 Dalits and 4 Muslims. Also there are 9 upper caste candidates. The party still has to declare candidates on three seats--Fatehpur, Kaiserganj and Robertsganj.
The party has given one seat from its total share of 63 to TMC’s Lalitesh Pati Tripathi. Under the seat sharing between the SP and Congress, the SP kept 63 seats and gave 17 to the Congress.
The 16th Lok Sabha (2014-2019) had five Yadav family members: Mulayam Singh Yadav, Dimple Yadav, Dharmendra Yadav, Akshay Yadav and Tej Pratap Yadav. At the same time, Akhilesh’s uncle Ramgopal Yadav was in the Rajya Sabha, Akhilesh Yadav was in the U.P. Legislative Council while Shivpal Yadav was in the U.P. Legislative Assembly.
In all, there were eight Yadav family members in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, besides in both the houses of the U.P. legislature. Currently, there is one Yadav clan member each in the Lok Sabha (Dimple Yadav) and Rajya Sabha (Ramgopal Yadav), two in the U.P. assembly (Akhilesh and Shivpal) and none in the U.P. Legislative Council.
Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav entered electoral politics in 1967, winning the Jaswant Nagar assembly seat in Etawah as a Samyukta Socialist Party member. In all, he won the same seat six times after that. After forming the Samajwadi Party in 1992, he entered national politics in 1996 and passed on his Jaswant Nagar assembly constituency to his younger brother Shivpal Yadav.
Shivpal has already been Mulayam’s right-hand man in politics for a very long time and Mulayam did not face any criticism for initiating him into active politics. Shivpal won the Jaswant Nagar seat in his maiden assembly election in 1996. He won the seat six times in a row since then.
The ‘Parivarvaad’ criticism surfaced for the first time when the SP founder member Janeshwar Mishra asked Mulayam to field his son Akhilesh Yadav from the Kannauj Lok Sabha bypoll in 1999-2000. Mulayam was apprehensive as he started facing internal ‘Parivarvaad’ criticism within the party. At this, Janeshwar Mishra convinced Mulayam by saying “This is not political Parivarvaad, rather it is Parivarvaad of struggle. Trust me, he will take the SP way more forward with the struggle.”
