Building brand Akhilesh
Battling first his father's shadow and then the Yadav clan, Akhilesh is finally trying to become his own man in the run-up to the crucial 2017 assembly election in Uttar Pradesh.
There is no flagpole on the nose, and no red beacon above the cockpit, but there is still something oddly officious about the eight-seater Hawker 900XP jet parked on the tarmac at Lucknow's Chaudhary Charan Singh international airport. It's the middle of the afternoon, the sun is glinting off the white fuselage, and the tiny windows are tinted in a tantalising shade that reveal just a little bit of the plush interiors. Inside, Akhilesh Yadav, 42, chief minister of India's most populous state, is ready to embark on yet another whirlwind excursion. He is heading to Saifai, the village his father Mulayam Singh Yadav grew up in, and which is now a swanky hamlet that serves as the unofficial seat of the state's first family. For, though Akhilesh may be listed as the most important man in Uttar Pradesh in the guide books, he sits uneasy on the iron throne.
As the plane takes off, with Akhilesh in the middle of a deeply political conversation about next year's assembly elections, discussing Mayawati and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and suggesting how they might join hands to topple him, his voice suddenly trails off mid-sentence as he glimpses something in the distance. He points at the barren expanse of mud and trees below, and in the middle of it, at a long motorway that is being built at double-quick speed from Lucknow to Agra, and onwards to Delhi via the Yamuna Expressway. "There it is, see it with your own eyes," he says, "three hundred kilometres without a single break. That is what development looks like!"
This redefinition of 'development' may be exaggerated, but there is no question that Akhilesh is desperately trying to reinvent himself, before the 2017 referendum on his tenure, as a universal symbol of vikas. Not through promises, proposals or self-coined sobriquets, but by delivering six big-ticket projects that, he hopes, will help him protect his job from the marching armies of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), BJP and the Congress, while at the same time allowing him to emerge as the sole heir to his father's legacy within a Yadav family that is forever playing the game of thrones.
Four of the other projects are four-lane highways linking 44 district headquarters, the Lucknow metro being supervised by the redoubtable E. Sreedharan, a Rs 1,500 crore IT City in Chak Ganjaria on the outskirts of the state capital in which Shiv Nadar's HCL is the primary partner, and a cancer hospital in Lucknow with top-of-the-line facilities. The sixth major project, an international cricket stadium, is also shown off enthusiastically by Akhilesh-with the same satisfied twinkle in his eyes-before the plane touches down back in Lucknow later that evening.
It is important for Akhilesh that all these projects, along with a host of other smaller undertakings, are completed later this year-to be leveraged ahead of the assembly elections in UP, and to allow him to assert his hegemony over other members of the Yadav clan. Most notably, his uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav, 61, a powerful state minister with multiple portfolios under his charge, who has been named the 2017 campaign leader even though Akhilesh is the state president of the Samajwadi Party (SP), creating a power imbalance within a family that already boasts of six MPs and almost 20 members in different levels of politics. Ask Shivpal if a campaign leader has more power than a state party president in election time, and he smiles gently before responding, "Yes, he has." There is talk that, if the UP election is lost, Shivpal could easily claim the legacy of the 76-year-old Mulayam because of his hold over party workers, particularly in the Etawah-Mainpuri belt that has been the family's traditional stronghold.
At the same time, the Opposition parties are getting a whiff of power. Mayawati, sensing a weakness in Akhilesh's hold over the Muslim vote after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, has launched a massive campaign to reclaim the pink-sandstone citadel she had built for herself. The BJP, still intoxicated by its 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 general election, and reinvigorated by capturing Assam for the first time in May, is looking to go beyond its upper-caste vote bank. It has appointed backward caste leader and self-proclaimed "cow protector", Keshav Prasad Maurya,as the party's state chief for what could be a pivotal assembly verdict that serves as a gateway to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's possible re-election in 2019. BJP president Amit Shah and Union minister for home Rajnath Singh (a former chief minister of UP) have already asserted how important the state is in their grand plan, promising to leave no stone unturned to win a majority. And the Congress, desperate to regain ground and project itself as the only party that can unite a secular federal front against the BJP, has employed election strategist Prashant Kishor.
In the middle of these challenges, both internal and external, stands Akhilesh-on the frontlines of an SP army on which his hold is tenuous, and surrounded by multiple foes on an electoral battleground reeking of anti-incumbency.
What is at stake in next year's election is not just Akhilesh's job but also the future of SP. Mulayam had built his base by emerging as a backward leader in UP's post-Mandal dynamics, and as a champion of Muslims by protecting the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya during his first term as chief minister in 1990. But with him no longer in the best of health, the grip is slowly loosening. It's now up to Akhilesh to hang on to the traditional vote banks and expand the party base-which is why Mulayam had propped him up as chief minister in 2012 for a smooth handover. For most of Akhilesh's first term as chief minister, however, he has been mired in law-and-order problems, side-stepped by bureaucrats who still consider his father the real seat of power, and kept on a tight leash by members of the family. Akhilesh has not exactly been able to break out as a mass leader to fill his father's shoes-partly because of Mulayam's own inability to cede control. There are fears that five years out of power may end up marginalising SP, which has been the state's biggest regional power for more than two decades, and permanently damage Akhilesh's political future.
Family ties
To analyse Akhilesh's performance as chief minister, it is important to consider his peculiar situation as a son walking the line between his often controlling father and a bunch of other dynasts with their own direct access to power. For that, one needs to better understand the Yadav family.
What had started three decades ago with Mulayam, a farmer and former wrestler, evolving from a student leader to "netaji" for UP's backward classes, has morphed in recent years into an extended conglomerate of brothers, cousins, nephews and daughters-in-law. India often discusses the Nehru-Gandhi family as a political empire, but the Yadav dynasty is much more intricate by virtue of being non-nuclear in comparison with the Sonia-Rahul-Priyanka triumvirate.
So you have one line extending from Mulayam's eldest brother Ratan Singh, which today manifests itself in his grandson Tej Pratap Singh Yadav, the Mainpuri MP who is the youngest of the Yadavs in Parliament. Another line descends from Mulayam's younger brother Abhay Ram Yadav, a proud cowherd in Saifai, whose son Dharmendra is the MP from Badaun. A third line stems from Mulayam's first cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, a Rajya Sabha MP fondly known as "professor" within the family, whose son Akshay is the MP from Firozabad. Then there is Mulayam's youngest brother and most trusted aide, Shivpal, an MLA, whose son Aditya is the head of the state cooperative federation. Akhilesh himself is Mulayam's son from his first wife, Malti Devi; his wife Dimple is the MP from Kannauj. And finally there is Prateek, Mulayam's stepson from his second wife, Sadhana Singh; and his wife, the overtly ambitious Aparna, who will be an MLA candidate from Lucknow (Cantt) in the 2017 assembly polls. Amidst these more prominent members are sundry first, second and third cousins who serve in various capacities in party committees and local bodies. As the candid Shivpal says: "Some are reaping the benefits of their hard work, some of their good fortune."
"Netaji is like a banyan tree, and we're all growing in his shade," says another relative, asking not to be named even while offering this laudatory quote because he understands where the conversation might be headed. This Yadav clan is more like a complicated power structure than a simple family tree. It's not all friendly banter and affectionate chatter between kinsmen. Though there isn't any open acrimony, and the flock stands together against any foreign threat, there are constant rumblings within. The family is not loath to discussing, discreetly of course, whether Akhilesh has earned his place as chief minister or whether he is simply enjoying the privileges of being his father's son.
In the family village of Saifai, for example, the loose demarcations between 'Netaji', 'Mantriji' (Shivpal) and 'Mukhyamantriji' or 'Bhaiyya' (Akhilesh) are clear, depending on which part of this plush rural hub you are in. This is not to say that there is an active succession war-Akhilesh lived with Shivpal for several years as a child and there is a filial bond between them. But the question about which of the two can truly claim the son-of-the-soil legacy of Mulayam (who is in semi-retirement mode), or if someone else can emerge from the family as a suitable legatee, is not fully settled yet.
The prominence of Azam Khan, a senior minister in the UP cabinet and the party's Muslim face, complicates matters further because he is known to be a law unto himself. As is the wily Amar Singh, who wielded tremendous influence over Mulayam before being booted out of the party in 2010, and has managed to work his way back to prominence. Amar Singh was present for Mulayam's birthday celebrations in Saifai last November, co-hosted Shivpal's son Aditya's wedding reception at Zee Group owner Subhash Chandra's house on April 2, and was given the party's backing for a Rajya Sabha nomination on May 17. His first quote, true to form, was highly quotable: "I am not a Samajwadi, I am a Mulayamwadi." Akhilesh knows that in such a scenario, nothing succeeds like success. To maintain the status quo, it is important for him to tide over the next election and win a second term. It is to this end that the chief minister, who battled law-and-order problems and a perception that he wasn't quite up to the task for the first two-and-a-half years of his rule, has suddenly changed gears over the last 18 months. "Growth requires no calling card," he says. "Today, our work speaks for itself."
CM 1.0
But it wasn't always so. Akhilesh had stormed to power as the young face of SP on the back of an anti-incumbency wave against the Mayawati government in 2012. The tragedy of UP is that any BSP regime (there have been four since 1995) gets known for its spectacular corruption scandals and any SP regime (four since 1989) for its lawlessness. When Akhilesh first took charge, there were misgivings, but also a genuine hope that hewould usher in a fresh, technocratic style of governance.
But the youngest-ever chief minister of the state, only 38 at the time, was soon found to be wanting. A week after coming to power, Akhilesh reversed a decision that barred the UP constabulary from being posted either in their home district or in a neighbouring one-something that had prevented the creation of caste-based police bastions, for instance, of Yadavs in and around Etawah and Mainpuri or Jats in Muzaffarnagar and Meerut. Further, the station officers of the 1,600-odd police stations in the state used to be selected by an empanelment board that considered such factors as arrest record, criminal cases against the officer, corruption charges and so on. Akhilesh abandoned this policy primarily to favour Yadavs, who soon started controlling over 800 police stations in the state. And finally, as a senior police officer explains, the Special Task Force (STF) and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS)-the two most effective divisions of the UP Police in dealing with organised crime-lost teeth under the new administration, allowing old gangs to re-emerge. In a little over a year, the law-and-order situation deteriorated considerably.
Within months of his taking over, word spread in the UP secretariat that the new chief minister was apt to zoneing out when matters of policy were discussed with him, often peering into his smartphone during meetings. He would rarely go to office on the state secretariat's once all-powerful Pancham Tal (fifth floor) and preferred to operate from his official residence at 5, Kalidas Marg. Here, he constantly scoped local TV news channels and met with local party leaders sent by his father to get some petty work done. It became hard to seek a meeting with him after 7 pm, when he spent time with family and friends. Many of these friends were local businessmen who SP insiders described as Akhilesh's "hi-hello brigade" and blamed for distancing him from ground realities. He would often disappear for foreign trips, linger for up to three hours at ceremonial events where he was expected to make only a token appearance. The word in the secretariat was that Akhilesh was non-serious, too busy enjoying the perks of power and the good life to care about running the state. Much of the governance work was being handled by Mulayam, his loyal IAS officer Anita Singh (who still monitors Akhilesh as his principal secretary), Shivpal, Azam Khan and Ram Gopal. The joke in the bureaucracy, as reported by India Today in 2013, was that there were five-and-a-half chief ministers in the state-Akhilesh being the half.
It took the 2014 Lok Sabha elections-in which all the SP candidates, except five members of the Yadav family, were defeated-to jolt Akhilesh into action. The ivory tower from which he thought all was well in his rule started to crumble. The three years left in his term started seeming like a final countdown. On June 10, 2014, barely two weeks after Modi had been sworn in as prime minister, he called all senior officers in the state for a meeting in the Vidhan Sabha's wood-panelled Tilak Hall, and said that they would be held accountable for their actions. "If you don't perform, you will be removed," he told them.
Development gear
It was hard to get his father and other relatives on the same page on several issues, including law-and-order, so Akhilesh decided to concentrate on big development projects. That Alok Ranjan, an IAS officer with a reputation for getting things done, had just taken over as chief secretary, helped give direction to his vision. Construction of the Lucknow Metro, which was part of the SP manifesto, started in September 2014. The foundation stone of the Lucknow-Agra expressway, which wasn't in the manifesto, was laid in November 2014.
Insiders say some of Akhilesh's old problems remain-disappearing into the phone during meetings, going AWOL in the evenings, and being unable to withstand family pressure (Mulayam has scolded him in public on two occasions in 2014 and once in 2015). But officers in the secretariat seem to think that he has changed from "someone who didn't seem to care to someone who's trying really hard". It may have started as an act of self-preservation, but he has been growing in confidence as his pet projects have started taking shape.
"Perhaps it took me a while to get into the groove," Akhilesh concedes. "This is a complicated state, a large state. You need to find the right officers, the right way to make the system work." The big question is, will this change of gear make up for his early inactivity, or is it too late already?
The two principal thrusts of Akhilesh's development plan have been transport and investment, with healthcare and tourism thrown in to complete the portfolio (see graphic Fast Track to Success). A Project Management Group in the government looks at the status of 21 ongoing projects on a weekly basis, overseeing approximately Rs 20,000 crore in funding that has been raised through various methods.
The Rs 8,775 crore, 326 kilometre Lucknow-Agra expressway is entirely a state government project. Attempts had been made for a private-public partnership but this approach was quickly abandoned due to a tepid response, and Akhilesh decided to build the road from the government's coffers with the possibility of charging tolls to recover a part of the building and maintenance cost once the highway is functional.
"Can you see that we are flying right along the road? Where does that happen?" Akhilesh asks in mid-air. "We've built the highway as the crow flies-the shortest possible distance between any two points." The UP government managed to acquire huge tracts of land without a murmur of dissent by offering farmers up to four times the circle rates. Akhilesh also ensured minimal permissions were needed, by steering well clear of environmental hotspots that would require Central government approval. At one point, near Etawah, the original plan was taking the road close to the lion sanctuary coming up in the vicinity. In order to avoid clearances, which, Akhilesh says, "may never have come", the road was moved about 10 kilometres.
The main carriageway is expected to be ready this October, making the entire 500-odd km run between Delhi and Lucknow possible in less than seven hours at optimal speed. The government is hoping this new road network, along with the linking of district headquarters with four-lane highways, will boost the agrarian and urban economies of the state, as well as encourage such developments as the IT City in Lucknow and the High-Tech City in Kanpur. They will then pull the expressway towards the eastern edge of the state to Ballia for a seamless cross-state motorway.
Another major project, the Lucknow Metro, is also well under way. The first phase, which cost Rs 2,000 crore, will be complete this December, connecting the airport and Charbagh railway station via an elevated track. The central hub of the city, around the Hazratganj area, is to get an underground service, before the metro comes overground again for its northeastward journey to Munshi Pulia. Four other metro networks are being planned in Kanpur, Meerut, Allahabad and in Prime Minister Modi's constituency Varanasi.
"I am delighted that everything is chugging along at full speed now. The public can see that things are changing. We are not making statues of ourselves and parks that are kept locked," Akhilesh says, alluding to Mayawati's infamous odes to herself. "We are making everyone's lives better."
The projects are making an impact, with the state's GDP growth (at market prices) rising to 6.2 per cent in 2014-15 from 4.9 per cent in 2013-14, according to government data. Foreign investment is increasing too, but the 66 per cent agrarian state still lags behind in education, housing and healthcare in rural areas. For example, infant mortality rate, according to 2013 data, was 50 per 1,000 births against the national average of 40. There is a massive rebranding exercise going on in which Akhilesh is being promoted as a young chief minister with a vision. Print, radio and television advertisements talk about the various projects, and particularly about how he is helping envisage them and seeing them through. Call any senior officer in the UP government ands you are bound to hear the caller tune Yuva Soch, Yuva Josh, which is a paean to Akhilesh's youthful energy.
The battle for UP
But the jury is still out on whether this work is going to be enough to win UP next spring, and if the mistakes made over the first 30 months of the Akhilesh Yadav government, particularly the perceived alienation of Muslims and the worsened law-and-order situation, will return to haunt him.
The Opposition has decided to attack Akhilesh on his original image as a bungling, frivolous leader who is out of his depth and too tied down by family compulsions to be his own man. "How can one expect welfare from a person who is busy organising lavish fairs in Saifai, undertaking foreign tours, and playing cricket matches with officers?" Mayawati, 60, thundered on April 14 during Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar's birthday celebrations. "Officers can ensure your victory in matches, but not in assembly polls!" She was referring to a recent friendly match between the CM XI and IAS XI that was fixed to the point where an officer was seen chastising himself, rather than celebrating, after he got Akhilesh's wicket. His response has been to satirically refer to Mayawati as "Bua" (father's sister) and challenge her to a sharp contest, while emphasising repeatedly that she might join hands with the BJP, perhaps in a bid to warn Muslim voters. Similarly, former SP leader Raj Babbar, who is with the Congress and had defeated Dimple in the 2009 Lok Sabha by-election in Kannauj, rates Akhilesh "zero on 10", accusing him of "sleeping for four years and then rushing forward to complete gigantic projects in one year". The chief minister's response has been to simply wave away the allegations with a mischievous smile.
Uttar Pradesh always has a complex election arithmetic. In 2012, when SP stormed to power with 224 of the 403 seats, its vote share was 29 per cent compared with the incumbent Mayawati's 26 per cent. The BJP and Congress had managed to win just 15 and 12 per cent votes respectively. But the scene changed dramatically in 2014 when the Modi wave in the state got the BJP 43 per cent votes, while reducing the ruling SP to 22 per cent. The BSP, which got almost 20 per cent of the popular vote, could not even open its account. This time, the prediction is of a tough four-cornered contest, with the Congress the least likely to spring a surprise, in spite of Kishor's idea that either Rahul Gandhi or his sister Priyanka jump into the fray as CM candidate.
The state's 20 per cent Dalit votes traditionally go to Mayawati. Of the 50 per cent OBC votes, one section sides with Mulayam while the others swing between BSP and BJP. The BJP had picked up a large chunk of this pie in 2014 because of a consolidation of Hindu votes, and though such a dramatic amalgamation may no longer be possible, it is hoping to benefit with Maurya's elevation as the party's new face. The real battle is for the 19 per cent Muslim votes, which can oscillate between Mulayam and the Congress, and even shift en masse to Mayawati, as they did in 2007 to combat the BJP threat. A Muslim plus OBC, or Muslim plus Dalit consolidation is usually enough for the SP or BSP to come to power. The BJP, meanwhile, tries to unite OBCs and upper castes to counter the Muslim vote.
SP members, including Akhilesh, say little about the BJP or Prime Minister Modi, perhaps because of the CBI sword hanging over their heads in a long-running disproportionate assets case. But political experts in the state feel that the battle will become far more intense as next year's election gets closer. The BJP will try to polarise the electorate by raising issues such as 'love jihad', cow slaughter, ghar wapasi and Ram Mandir to win UP and reassert its right to rule.
The biggest threat to Akhilesh, however, is likely to come from four-time chief minister Mayawati, whose battle with Mulayam is as personal as it is political. With Dalit votes firmly with the BSP, just as a chunk of the OBC votes are with the SP, which way the Muslims and upper castes swing could be pivotal. The Muslim vote could drift away from the SP for many reasons, including anger over the government's failure to stop the Muzaffarnagar riots, Mulayam pulling out of the anti-BJP grand alliance in Bihar, and his statement that he's remorseful that kar sevaks who wanted to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1990 were fired upon. "I want both the BSP and BJP to fight the election with all their might," Akhilesh says, adding, for the third time, "as long as they don't join hands." A strategic suggestion to their respective vote banks that choosing one may be choosing the other. It would have sounded bizarre a couple of years ago, but the 2017 UP assembly elections hinge neither on Mulayam, nor on the Opposition, but on whether Akhilesh can successfully sell his new image to the public and get credit for his development initiatives. It's a strategy that echoes-or mimics-the marketing of Modi as a growth icon going into the 2007 Gujarat assembly elections.
As he lands back at Lucknow airport, rushing off to his next meeting at Kalidas Marg, Akhilesh's surroundings are still indicative of his encirclement. He lives a stone's throw away at Vikramaditya Marg, in a large bungalow he shares with Mulayam, Sadhana, Prateek and Aparna. Two houses away is Azam Khan, three houses away is the Samajwadi Party office, and across the road, diagonally opposite, is the private residence of Shivpal. One would think that Akhilesh winning the family over would have a direct impact on him winning the state. But here, in this bubbling political cauldron, it may well be the other way around.
Just before darting into his office, Akhilesh turns for a parting shot: "I'm only thinking about the next few months...about finishing the work," he says. "2017 will take care of itself."
Follow the writer on Twitter @_kunal_pradhan