A FLUID STATE

THE SAMAJWADI PARTY GIVES OLD ALLIES A SNUB EVEN AS DIFFERENCES EMERGE BETWEEN ITS CHIEF AKHILESH YADAV AND JAILED LEADER AZAM KHAN; THE BJP LEAVES SITTING MPS HIGH AND DRY

- Prashant Srivastava

IF a physicist were to determine the 'state' of politics, solid would definitely not make the cut. For, given the weak bonds between political actors, politics more closely resembles the fluid state, conforming to the constraints of ever-shifting dynamics just like liquids take the shape of their containers-and gases even escape them. With just days to go for the Lok Sabha election, this Brownian motion of atoms and molecules is on full display in Uttar Pradesh. The Samajwadi Party (SP) has given a jolt to its former allies Apna Dal (Kamerawadi) and Dalit-centric Azad Samaj Party (ASP) by keeping them out of the seat-sharing discussions. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), too, has cold-shouldered its sitting MPs Varun Gandhi and General V.K. Singh (retd) among others, choosing fresh faces.

But the SP's actions seemed rather more counter-intuitive, diminishing rather than expanding resources in times of scarcity. Its declaration of a candidate from the prize Nagina seat in mid-March effectively ended the possibility of an alliance with the ASP, led by Chandrashekhar Azad.Azad, who is also the Bhim Army chief, had already entered the fray in Nagina (which is reserved for Scheduled Castes), and the SP was expected to extend support to him and Azad, in turn, would campaign for the I.N.D.I.A. bloc elsewhere. This was seen as an idea with potential, given the ambiguous distance UP's other behemoth, Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), kept from I.N.D.I.A.