New Delhi: The chances of Akhilesh Yadav creating history by becoming the first chief minister to get a second consecutive term in nearly three decades in Uttar Pradesh is fast receding, going by the early trends of the assembly election results.
He would have be the youngest chief minister to achieve that feat.
Irrespective of the election outcome, Akhilesh Yadav has established himself as an astute politician in the run up to the D-Day. Not only did he have to take on a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a resilient Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), he also had to deal with a succession battle within his own family.
As the power struggle between Akhilesh Yadav and his father and Samajwadi Party (SP) patriarch, Mulayam Singh Yadav and his brother Shivpal Yadav intensified, support for the Akhilesh Yadav camp increased within the party. With majority of the SP members backing him, not only did Akhilesh Yadav successfully overcome political rivals in his family, he also became the face of the party’s campaign—sidelining his father—for the state election.
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The political certitude of Akhilesh Yadav added to the impressive hue of him as a young, development-oriented, progressive leader. His personality-centric campaign, developed by professionals from the Harvard University, was both a takeaway from and a direct challenge to Modi’s campaign.
With a tagline of kaam bolta hai (work speaks for itself), Akhilesh’s poll pitch focused on the work undertaken by the SP government in the past five years, including the Samajwadi Pension scheme, Agra-Lucknow expressway, Lucknow metro, laptop distribution scheme and 108 ambulance service.
Even the alliance with the Congress rode on the popularity of Akhilesh Yadav as by virtue of being out of power for 27 years in the state, the Congress did not have much to offer apart from helping the SP consolidate the minority vote.
Not only did the chief minister work at reinventing himself, appealing to the aspirations of the voters of UP—especially the youth, women and farmers, he also made efforts to refurbish the image of the Samajwadi Party. Schemes like UP-100, an emergency police service, was launched to shed the governance baggage associated with SP and Akhilesh Yadav even opposed SP’s merger with alleged gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari’s Quami Ekta Dal, which ultimately joined hands with the BSP, to project a clean image of the party before the election.
Indeed it is a big gamble for Akhilesh Yadav.
