Samajwadi Party: Not So Happy Families

The bitter family feud within the Samajwadi Party has further complicated the already tangled election math in UP.

- Kunal Pradhan

Until two weeks ago, the Samajwadi Party (SP) had a refreshingly good story to sell. A party that had in the past relied on social engineering and on the failure of others to storm to power— on four occasions since 1989—but could never get re-elected, had an opportunity to make amends. The state’s young chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, having undergone a personal transformation after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, in which the party won only five of the state’s 80 seats, had decided to bank on six big-ticket development projects to make a new pitch to the Uttar Pradesh electorate. He had hoped that the failures of his regime—lawlessness, corruption and nepotism, which had also dragged down other SP governments—would be overshadowed by his push for vikas, particularly since his rivals were themselves in various states of discomfort.

The BJP was struggling to project a strong chief ministerial candidate, the BSP was finding it hard to deal with defections after failing to open its account in 2014, and the Congress was starting its poll challenge from too far back to mount a credible attack. Against such a backdrop, Akhilesh had hoped that his development plank would be enough to win the party another term, employing a strategy not dissimilar to the one that had worked for Narendra Modi in Gujarat after the 2002 riots. But the script was so different from what the SP is normally used to that the hierarchy in his own party was unable to handle it.