A Hand On The Cycle

A Samajwadi Party Congress alliance may bolster their poll prospects in UP, but it is far from a done deal.

- Kaushik Deka

We will fight the elections alone.” Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi repeated this sentence three times in an exclusive interview with the magazinein September. He was in the middle of the month-long kisan yatra across Uttar Pradesh, the first bigscale campaign his party launched in the run-up to the 2017 assembly elections. “The cycle is punctured and Akhilesh Yadav has thrown out the tyres,” Rahul took a dig at the Samajwadi Party (SP) over the family feud involving Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and uncle Shivpal Yadav.

Nearly two months later, the Congress’s election strategist Prashant Kishor (Rahul insists his job is to execute the strategy drawn up by the party leadership) met SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh three times in 10 days. There is intense speculation that the two parties are exploring a pre-election tie-up. While neither has officially confirmed these meetings took place to negotiate the Congress’s role in the proposed mahagathbandhan (grand alliance), featuring SP, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal and Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, off-record conversations among political leaders indicate it was Mulayam who first expressed interest in an alliance with the Congress. Word was sent to Kishor, who got Rahul’s nod to start talks. “It’s still an informal process. We are testing the waters,” says a member of Rahul’s office. “That’s why everyone was not consulted. Kishor is not a Congress member, so he is the best person to negotiate unofficially. But it would be foolish to assume he’d do such a thing without Rahul’s consent.”