Uttar Pradesh elections 2017: A lot new, a little old in the making of SP 2.0

In Bareilly’s bazaar, Narayan Datt Sharma runs a garment shop. A traditional BJP voter, he will still stick with the party despite the hardships caused by notebandi. Yet, reflecting the goodwill Akhilesh has won across sections, he says what he would not have said for Akhilesh’s father: “Akhilesh ji is a good man and there is no goonda raj. Work has happened. He needs another chance to complete so many things.”

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1 First among the transformations is that of the party’s public image. The SP has been in power thrice and whenever its stint has drawn to a close, the expression goonda raj has been used to characterise it. But months before this term drew to a close came a calculated move to counter that. In November, the “Dial 100” scheme that brings police quickly to one’s doorstep was upscaled to an integrated, centralised emergency system, set up with an allocation of Rs 2,200, and putting a response to all emergencies just a phone call away. The scheme has not been foolproof but it has made police vans crisscrossing cities and towns more visible.

It is perhaps the biggest example of a larger overhaul. A major part in this makeover is the Akhilesh’s propaganda machinery, borrowed liberally from the Narendra Modi Playbook: the many personnel who monitor and organise “surveys”, the WhatsApp groups and the instant communication and building the idea of a “development man”.

2 Second, the public sparring with his father and uncles, unseemly as it may have appeared, has shaken off the shadow that they brought on Akhilesh’s tenure. The very public spats appear to have gone down very well with his supporters. An elderly farmer in Umardaraz of Gautam Buddha Nagar, usually full of praise for Mulayam, finds the transition to Akhilesh most natural. He is confident that he “is his father’s son politically and will take his work forward”; Mulayam Singh Yadav is not being missed by many in even the Samajwadi Party’s hardcore base.

3 Third, the security of having retained his electoral core base has enabled Akhilesh to stretch out and behave as something like an amalgam of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad, the development face and the social engineer. Akhilesh is no longer constrained as a leader of this or that community, yet is secure that the base will stay with him. This has saved him the pressure of having to appear more sectarian, as that job has already been done by his father. Says Jaan e-Alam in Moradabad, “We are thrilled that he does not take names of castes and communities but belongs to everyone, addresses all in this large state.”

4 Fourth, what Akhilesh with his deft communications and “work” — pensions and building homes, among others — has managed is to mimic what Y S R Reddy and Sheela Dikshit were able to do, offer hope of a welfare state. In the small hamlet of Anguri Tanda in Bareilly, Jayalalithaa is invoked. Says a young farmer: “The chief minister of Tamil Nadu, who expired recently? Unhone jaise wahan kiya hai, aur unka jitna naam tha, inka bhi aise hi ho jayega.”

Mohd Naeem makes a significant point as he says this. The criticism of progressive politics in UP, as opposed to Tamil Nadu, has been that it has stopped at the question of representation — it has not been sufficient to bring meaningful change in the lives of the communities it claims to empower.

5 Fifth, SP 2.0 appears to be pitching itself as the solution to individual problems, not group identities alone. By addressing the individual voter, Akhilesh has been able to go beyond the silo of the Muslim-Yadav framework that the SP used to seen as being about. The tagline of the campaign is “Kaam bolta hai”. In his first election speech in Sultanpur, Akhilesh said his big question about demonetisation was, “Aapko kya mila?” or what did each individual gain. He skilfully turned it into an issue forcing voters not to buy the “rich versus poor” line PM Modi seemed to have pushed in the early days of demonetisation.

Firasat in Anguri Tanda points out that electricity in his village has been a fact of life for the past 2½ years. “It is here for 20 hours at least,” he says. Here, even those who are not traditional SP voters say homes have been built and battery rickshaws distributed, which have helped young men find jobs.

Two battery-rickshaw operators in Manjhola Mandi in Moradabad say their lives have changed after getting rickshaws. The sense that without the baggage of the uncles, “the boy” will deliver on promises he has made and what he has shown us he can do.

6 A key element associated with Mulayam has been his political unpredictability. Akhilesh appears keen to be seen as doing a course correction. An alliance was sealed with more than 100 seats given to the Congress, a deal spun to convey, in the chief minister’s own words, “large-heartedness”. More than deepening personal ties, this is meant to send a political signal of being a reliable partner, a reputation that has eluded his father’s SP for decades now.

Political scholar Gilles Verniers says what has diminished is “the role of factions within the party, and since there has been a major internal power reshuffle, we can expect more centralisation”. On what has not changed, he says: “The sociology of the party is not affected. At best, you have a partial generational renewal with the recruitment of younger candidates and party office-holders, but their socio-economic background remains the same. In fact, many of the young people surrounding Akhilesh are sons of politicians, and the power reshuffle does not amount to a clean-up of the party, even though Akhilesh is more cautious with appearances of cleanliness.”

So while Akhilesh has launched an energetic bid to wrestle free of the grip of Saifai politics, the fact remains that his has been a party of family members and a closely-knit Yadav clan. It sends the maximum members of a single family to Parliament even today. To top that is the experience of Uncle Raj that many UP residents criticised for four years until Akhilesh shook off that yoke.

Can the offer of hope from the dramatic turnaround trump incumbency issues? Sources close to him say Akhilesh is playing for stakes beyond this election. The purpose being to refresh the idea of a powerful socialist party in India’s largest state at play for top stakes in 2019.