Uttar Pradesh: Signs of thaw? Akhilesh Yadav seeks front-row House seat for Shivpal Yadav

LUCKNOW: In what is being seen as a sign of rapprochement between the warring chacha & bhatija, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday sought a front-row seat for estranged uncle Shivpal Yadav in the Vidhan Sabha.
"Our national president Akhilesh Yadav has written a letter to the Assembly Speaker Satish Mahana urging him to allot a front-row seat to Shivpal Yadav as he is a very senior politician," confirmed SP national spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary. He said Shivpal is a senior politician, and therefore, he should sit in the front row. The SP leaders, however, parried queries as to why the party did not raise the issue when the seats were allotted in the Assembly earlier this year.
Akhilesh’s letter move came too late, feels PSP-L
The monsoon session of the Assembly is slated to begin on September 19. The SP chief seeking a front-row seat for his uncle comes days after Shivpal – who is the national president of Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party-Lohia (PSP-L) that he floated after parting ways with Akhilesh in 2017 – announced that he will not enter into any political affiliations with SP ever in future. This was followed by Shivpal not refuting rumours of him contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha polls from Mainpuri in case sitting MP and his elder brother Mulayam Singh Yadav decided not to contest from the seat.
This is the first time that the SP leadership seems to soften its stand towards Shivpal ever since the latter took exception to not being invited to the first key meeting of SP MLAs in March held after the 2022 polls. The SP leadership, too, had made no attempts to mend fences with Chacha ever since. In the presidential polls held in July, Shivpal voted for NDA candidate Draupadi Murmu. Agitated, the SP issued an office memo addressed to Shivpal “setting him free” to side with any political ideology of his choice in future. In the political circles, Akhilesh Yadav’s letter to the Assembly Speaker is being seen as a possible attempt to placate Shivpal.
“There was a clear lack of communication between the SP and PSP-L where Shivpal was the only leader to whom Akhilesh Yadav would talk to. That was one and important reason for the bad blood between the two. Now that Shivpal’s son Aditya Yadav has become the state president of PSP-L and is known to have good relations with Akhilesh at a personal level, things might change,” said a political commentator. Within the PSP-L, Akhilesh’s letter is being seen as a move that has come very late. “Shivpal Yadav is a top-ranking politician in UP and should have got a front-row seat in the beginning itself.
But SP paid no heed to it. The SP has not done any favour by sending the letter to the Assembly Speaker. They should have done it the day our party chief was not allotted a seat in the front row,” said PSP-L national spokesperson Deepak Mishra. The PSP-L leaders pointed out that the SP maintained a studied silence when Shivpal Yadav himself wrote a letter to the Assembly Speaker in May last seeking a seat in one of the front rows in tune with his seniority in the House as he was elected MLA for the sixth term. “The SP kept quiet then and has now sent a letter when Shivpal Yadav has started strengthening his party. The sequence of developments speaks for itself,” said a PSP-L leader.