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Lok Sabha elections 2019: 20 years on, life has come full circle for Akhilesh Yadav
Akhilesh Yadav has won the Lok Sabha elections from Kannauj three times — in the 2000 bypoll, and in the general elections in 2004 and 2009.
Twenty years ago, the then Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav vacated the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat for his son Akhilesh Yadav, who began his political journey at the age of 27 in 2000 by winning from the constituency.
Akhilesh, who now leads the party, has fielded his father from Mainpuri seat in the Lok Sabha election this year.
Akhilesh will contest the Lok Sabha elections from Azamgarh, a constituency that is currently represented by his father. The 45-year-old has won the Lok Sabha elections from Kannauj three times — in the 2000 bypoll, and in the general elections in 2004 and 2009. He vacated the seat in 2012 after becoming the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. His wife Dimple Yadav was later elected as the MP from the seat in a bypoll.
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Akhilesh has gone into crucial elections taking a leaf out a chapter of his father’s political journey. Just the way Mulayam allied with Kanshi Ram and his Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1993 to prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from coming to power in Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh has formed the alliance with Mayawati and her party to contest the Lok Sabha election 2019.
When Mulayam allied with the BSP, the SP was barely a year old party. Now, as Akhilesh has allied with the BSP, the ‘new’ Samajwadi Party under him was barely a year old.
Read: All you need to know about Uttar Pradesh
And the similarities do not end here. Like Akhilesh, when Mulayam had allied with the BSP, he had served as UP chief minister once. The resemblance between the father and the son are uncanny -- by looks, mannerism, and political moves.
Mulayam had succeeded in keeping the BJP out of power through the SP-BSP alliance. The result of Akhilesh’s experiment and his political future will be out on May 23.
Unlike Mulayam, Akhilesh got politics as legacy but his political struggles were no less astute.
The transfer of power from father to son was not smooth, though Mulayam had been sufficiently grooming and training Akhilesh since 1999.
Read: Legacy, hard work have helped Congress’s Priya Dutt
After becoming the member of Parliament from Kannauj, Mulayam first made Akhilesh the national president of the SP’s youth wings. In 2009, unhappy with SP’s victory on 23 seats in the Lok Sabha polls, Mulayam had removed the then state president Shivpal Yadav replacing him with Akhilesh. He asked his son to reboot the state unit of the party. This also sowed the seeds of the feud in Yadav family that broke out in August 2016.
Akhilesh, an engineer by training, worked hard on the youth wings of the party since 2000 and that paid dividends in 2012 polls. He was the first one to launch an organised and continuous statewide campaign through his Kranti Rath Yatra on September 12, 2011, with the support of his youth wing cadre. He took the same bus as a ’rath’, which Mulayam used against the Congress government in 1987 that led him to take over as chief minister in 1989 by ousting the ND Tiwari government.
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For the first time, the party won a full majority in assembly elections and the credit automatically went to Akhilesh. Mulayam, instead of assuming the chief ministership himself, coronated his son. Akhilesh became the youngest chief minister in March 2012 and gradually positioned himself as a ‘development man’.
He and his government take credit for numerous big-ticket projects like Lucknow Metro, Agra-Lucknow Expressway (with India’s first road runway on it), Asia’s biggest party in urban settings, the Janeswar Mishra Park in Lucknow, International cricket stadium in Lucknow, and the world’s biggest free laptop distribution scheme.
However, Akhilesh was the state president and the chief minister when SP in 2014 LS polls came down to five seats from its 2009 tally of 23. And his slogan ‘Kaam bolta hai (work speaks)’ also did not work in the 2017 state election when he was both the chief minister and the national president of the party.
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While preparing for the 2017 UP assembly elections, Akhilesh was in the midst of an intense feud with his uncle Shivpal Yadav, a minister in his government, for the control over the party. The infighting spilt onto the streets and eventually Akhilesh, through an emergency convention of the party, took over as its national president on January 1, 2017.
The first thing that Akhilesh did after taking over the reins of the party was to ally with Rahul Gandhi and his Congress party for the 2017 polls. The idea did not click.
This time around, both Akhilesh and Mayawati have kept the Congress at an arm’s length.
However, the similarities between Akhilesh’s Samajwadi Party Mulayam’s SP end there.
The old SP had multiple centres of power - Mulayam himself, Janeshwar Mishra, Ramgopal Yadav, Amar Singh, Azam Khan and Shivpal Yadav. Akhilesh ended the old order and turned the party monolithic. He is the only power centre now.
