Backroom Brief | AI, startups, health: Inside Akhilesh Yadav’s ‘Vision India’ roadshow

Last week, at a Vision India summit in Bhubaneshwar, where the SP has virtually no presence, Yadav spoke on holistic health and interacted with intellectuals, the media, and the youth. Since late last year, the SP chief has addressed several such summits on a range of issues: in November, he spoke on startups in Bengaluru, and then on Artificial Intelligence in Hyderabad last December. SP sources said more such summits were planned, including in Ladakh, Jaipur, and Mumbai in the coming days, and later in major UP cities too.

Though these Vision India summits are the initiatives of the SP, the party says they are “non-political” events. “Vision India will pave the way for a positive, pragmatic and progressive future. In these summits, Akhilesh Yadav ji interacts with experts of the field concerned and young minds, listens to their opinions and shares his vision on these issues. The ideas collected in these summits will be included in the party’s manifesto in future elections,” said Rajeev Rai, the SP’s Ghosi Lok Sabha MP and the chief coordinator of the Vision India summits.

Rai said the SP’s rivals had created a “wrong perception” about the party and that it was working to change it. “Opponents say that the SP is based only in rural areas of UP and gets votes from Muslims and Yadavs. However, the reality is that the SP has a presence across the country, it gets votes from people across sections and our leader has a vision for the growth of the entire country. Through these events, the SP is reaching new voters,” said another leader.

Appointment of a mahant

The summits are part of a larger push to reshape the party’s image. Last Wednesday, Yadav appointed mahant Shubham Giri as the working president of the SP’s Uttarakhand unit. While Giri, who lives in an ashram in Haridwar, has previously held organisational roles in the party, including as state secretary, he is seeking an active role in electoral politics and is learnt to have plans to contest the 2027 Uttarakhand Assembly elections.

SP spokesperson and Uttarakhand in-charge Rajendra Chaudhary is the SP’s “respect for all mahants, seers and saints”. His appointment came the same day Yadav accused the BJP government in UP of “humiliating seers” by preventing Shankaracharya Avimukteshwaranand from taking a holy dip in Prayagraj. “We will serve the people with the blessings of Shankaracharya ji and the saints and sadhus,” Yadav said.

Taking a page out of the BJP’s temple politics playbook, Yadav’s wife and SP MP Dimple had consecrated the Kedareshwar Mahadev Temple in his hometown of Etawah in January 2024, coinciding with Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading the consecration ceremony of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. The Etawah temple, spread across 11 acres in the heart of the Yadav belt and already drawing devotees, is being built by a trust headed by Akhilesh and is expected to be completed this year.

This isn’t Yadav’s first attempt at reshaping the party’s image. Ahead of the 2012 Assembly polls, he publicly sought to distance himself from the party’s anti-English and anti-computer stand after his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, during the 2009 Lok Sabha campaign, spoke against the use of English and computers in education. The party went on to make a pointed effort to highlight its social media and online presence, with references to its youth wing in the Samajwadi Yuvajan Sabha, in the full-page advertisements it published on the occasion of Mulayam’s birthday in 2011. The ads were Akhilesh’s brainchild, and their target audience was youth voters in UP. Whether this tonal shift was among the deciding factors or not, the SP went on to win an outright majority in the 2012 Assembly polls.