New Delhi: One of the first campaign videos released in October last year by the Samajwadi Party (SP) for the Uttar Pradesh assembly election revolved around chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and the development work undertaken by his government in the last five years. However, in what was a signal of things to come, the video, launched in the middle of the Yadav family feud, did not feature party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav but instead his wife Dimple Yadav.
If the political assertion of Akhilesh Yadav was the first takeaway from the rift in the Yadav family, the formal entry of Dimple Yadav into the electoral fray was the second. Lok Sabha Member of Parliament from Kannauj, Dimple Yadav, who had till now been working behind the scenes, mostly looking after women and child development schemes in the state became the face of the party along with Akhilesh Yadav.
As a part of the campaign, she addressed rallies across the state and was also a part of the last joint road show of the SP-Congress alliance in Varanasi along with Akhilesh Yadav and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi. From being featured in all of the party’s campaign posters, to sharing the stage with her husband at the launch of SP’s poll manifesto on 22 January, Dimple Yadav was more than a star campaigner of the party.
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From fumbling while delivering her Lok Sabha speeches in Hindi to addressing huge crowds in the same language fluently, Dimple Yadav has come a long way. A team from the Harvard University, which was hired to design Akhilesh Yadav’s campaign, also trained Dimple Yadav for her public rallies.
“We held a couple of training sessions with her where we told her how to speak, what points to talk about and how to keep the address short so that people don’t lose their attention. She struggled in the first few rallies but she picked up sooner than expected. Her presence made a big difference to the success of the campaign. She connects with the public easily and was key to targeting the women and youth vote,” said a person in the chief minister’s campaign team.
With party supporters raising the slogan of “Vikas ki chabi, Dimple bhabhi (Dimple is the key to development), a confident Dimple Yadav addressed one rally after another, urging people to vote for Bhaiyaji (Akhilesh Yadav), while enlisting the government’s development work—Samajwadi Pension Yojna, laptop distribution scheme, ambulance and police helpline and others. She has also played an important role in wooing women, who accounted for 45.27% of Uttar Pradesh’s electorate in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
Whatever the results of the Uttar Pradesh election, Dimple Yadav has managed to carve out an important and irreplaceable place for herself in the party.
