Just ahead of the panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh, relatives of Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and members of his community have been ‘‘elected’’ to key posts in influential cooperative bodies.Mulayam’s brother, Shiv Pal Singh Yadav, was elected unopposed as Chairman of the apex U P Cooperative Rural Development Bank while nephew Dharmendra Yadav, MP from Mainpuri, had an easy passage to the Chairmanship of U.P.Cooperative Bank this week. The cooperative bodies, mainly the banks, play an instrumental role in villages to cater to the financial needs of the farmers.Besides being No 2 in the Mulayam ministry, Shivpal is also Chairman of the Etawah district cooperative bank (annual business Rs 200 cr) and holds a similar post in the apex state Mandi (Marketing) Federation.Another distant relative of the Chief Minister, Vishram Yadav, is also Chairman of the State Cooperative Cold Storage.It’s not just a coincidence that out of a total of 11 directors in the rural bank, eight are Yadavs while out of a total of 50 functional district cooperative banks in the state, over 40 have a Yadav as their Chairman.Though both Shivpal and Dharmendra attributed their victory to the electoral process, the fact is that the Mulayam government has appointed 98 directors to different cooperative bodies and they have voting rights besides other directors who are elected at the block level in the three-tier cooperative system.‘‘They (Shivpal, Dharmendra etc) are members of a large political family and need a forum to get entry into politics,’’ says T S Mehta, information advisor to the Chief Minister. ‘‘Shivpal had become Chairman of the U.P Cooperative Bank years before he was elected MLA. He had remained on the post for several years except during the BJP rule. There are no rules and regulations in politics.’’The BJP and the Congress have accused the Chief Minister of turning the elections in cooperative bodies into a farce. ‘‘The Samajwadi Party has highjacked the cooperative bodies. The manner in which elections were held has violated the basic spirit of the cooperative movement,’’ said Congress leader Satya Deo Tripathi. ‘‘It was not an election but selection of Mulayam’s family members and Yadavs.’’
