Who Is Dividing Mulayam & Son?

The bad blood in the Yadav family has the Samajwadi Party in a shambles.

- Ajay Uprety

It was an important meeting. The venue was the Samajwadi Party ’s headquarters in Lucknow, and those present included Mulayam Singh Yadav, the party’s national president, and members of the parliamentary board, the party’s apex decision-making body. Mulayam was on his feet, addressing the gathering. The chair meant for him was at the centre of the dais.

In came party leader Amar Singh. He glanced around and went straight to the vacant chair on the dais. As he sat down, other leaders pointed out that the chair was Mulayam’s. Singh waved them aside. “No one else would have dared to do so,” a senior member of the parliamentary board told THE WEEK. “This shows how much influence Amar Singh had over Netaji [Mulayam].”

This incident happened before Singh fell out with Mulayam and was expelled in 2010. He subsequently floated his own party, contested elections and lost. In May this year, he returned to the SP and was appointed national general secretary. Mulayam also inducted Singh into the parliamentary board, overruling objections from senior party leaders, including his son, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, and cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, MP. Singh’s influence over Mulayam is among the slew of issues that has caused fissures in the SP.

Singh, whom many SP leaders describe as an “outsider”, also has Shivpal Singh Yadav, Mulayam’s youngest brother and state party president, on his side. His return apparently aggravated the ongoing feud in the extended Yadav family. While it has been claimed that Mulayam’s intervention has bridged the fissures in the family, the reality is altogether different. The tug-of- war over control of the party is now between Akhilesh and Shivpal, and their camps are slinging mud at each other.