‘Parivarvaad has benefits’: Akhilesh says 5 family MPs ensured SP never split

“Several parties faced a split. Did you ever think why the Samajwadi Party did not face a split?” Yadav questioned and subsequently replied, “… because five of its MPs were from the same family. And we had many Muslim MPs… and some were die-hard Samajwadi. I am saying that sometimes there are advantages to parivarvaad,” he said, adding that no attempts were made to break the SP.

In June this year, NDA ally Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party chief Om Prakash Rajbhar had claimed that SP could be the next Opposition party—after Trinamool Congress—to face a split in Parliament.

All in the family

The five MPs Akhilesh Yadav was referring to are: Yadav himself, MP from Kannauj; his wife Dimple, MP from Mainpuri; and his cousins Aditya Yadav, Akshay Yadav, and Dharmendra Yadav, MPs from Badaun, Firozabad, and Azamgarh, respectively.

Confident of retaining its core Muslim-Yadav voter base and seeking to make inroads into the votes of non-Yadav OBCs, Akhilesh in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections had fielded only five candidates from the Yadav community in the 62 seats it contested in Uttar Pradesh. Incidentally, all five are from party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav’s family, and all won.

While Aditya is the son of Mulayam’s brother and Jaswantnagar MLA Shivpal Yadav, Akshay is the son of the SP patriarch’s cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, who is a Rajya Sabha MP. Dharmendra is the son of Mulayam’s brother Abhay Ram Yadav, who has stayed away from politics.

The Muslim MPs Yadav referred to include Afzal Ansari of Ghazipur, Iqra Choudhary of Kairana, Zia Ur Rehman from Sambhal and Mohibullah from Rampur. Except Mohibullah, the other three have inherited the political legacy of their families.