Akhilesh Everybody’s Brother

10/7/2015 Everybody’s Brother

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Akhilesh Yadav in the family businessBy Neha Dixit | September 1, 2015

Akhilesh Yadav, a two termmember of parliament, becameone of the faces of theSamajwadi Party in UttarPradesh in 2008, when he led astudent campaign against theMayawati government.

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TWO YEARS AGO on the morning of 6 September, Anita Singh, principal secretary to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, wasinformed that thousands of people from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Delhi were gathering at a village inMuzaffarnagar district. A “Jat Mahapanchayat,” a large-scale political meeting of the region’s Hindu Jats, was scheduled totake place the following day, curdling an atmosphere already soured by threats and suspicion. Some days earlier, two youngJat men and a Muslim youth had allegedly been murdered in an altercation; rumours had circulated of the latter harassing ayoung Hindu woman. A number of Jat-affiliated outfits had responded by organising the mahapanchayat, with the involvementand encouragement of the local cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party. All this had divided local Hindus and Muslims, and theregional authorities were on edge, anticipating violence.

Orders prohibiting assembly under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code were in force. The men occupying the posts ofsenior superintendent of police, and district magistrate, had been transferred out twice in the last fortnight. Thousands ofpolice and paramilitary personnel were mobilised in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts to maintain the state’s control over apotentially inflammatory situation. An additional director-general of police, Arun Kumar, had come west from Lucknow to keepan eye on the proceedings. Yet instructions to actually stop the mahapanchayat never arrived from the secretariat.

On this day, Uttar Pradesh’s youngest-ever chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, was in Delhi to inaugurate the new headquarters ofthe information technology body NASSCOM. The offices had been set up in Noida, the part of the National Capital Region thatfalls under his governance, but he was presiding over the ceremony from the Taj Mansingh hotel in central Delhi. Sinceassuming office in 2012, Yadav had inaugurated several major Noida projects remotely, usually from Lucknow. Manyspeculated that this was because of persistent stories about the “Noida jinx”—a political superstition that no chief minister ofUttar Pradesh who visited Noida got to keep his or her seat in the following election. It had created some bad press for Yadav.Journalists covering the inauguration wanted to know whether Yadav, a tech-savvy environment engineer who went aboutdistributing laptops to his state’s students, was falling prey to baseless belief. A reporter asked him why a young and modernchief minister was scared of Noida. Yadav, smiling, delivered a riposte in Hindi: “Because you guys live there.”

The Noida jinx preoccupies the “pancham tal,” or fifth floor, of the Uttar Pradesh secretariat in Lucknow, where the chiefminister’s offices are located. For at least 20 years now, every man in the post has considered a visit to Noida as a bad omenfor their career: anyone who visited, it was said, would not get another term in office. This had happened to Narayan DuttTiwari, Veer Bahadur Singh, and Rajnath Singh. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh’s father, went to Noida during one of histerms, failed to be re-elected, and did not repeat the trip when he regained power. Akhilesh’s predecessor, Mayawati, tried tobreak the jinx in the last few months of her tenure, but was taken to have failed when she lost the assembly elections in 2012.

In his keynote address at the NASSCOM inauguration, Yadav talked of Uttar Pradesh’s progress in the information technologysector, and his Samajwadi Party government’s scheme for distributing laptops to citizens. They were now planning to set up acyber-security lab at the NASSCOM headquarters. “We have spruced up the police control rooms to check the law and ordersituation in the state,” Yadav said. “With CCTVs and GPS-enabled police vehicles, the action forces will reach the scene of thecrime faster. The response time will be reduced.”

On the following day, 7 September, Nangla-Mandaur village was engulfed in a sea of people. Over a lakh and a half hadarrived to attend the mahapanchayat, many armed with guns, spears, daggers, swords and batons. Local media recordedclips of the proceedings, complete with inflammatory speeches and sloganeering. Calls to save Hindu daughters anddaughters-in-law from Muslims, and to avenge the deaths of the young Hindu men, were relayed on local cable channels andthrough WhatsApp.

That evening, rumours began to spread that hundreds of Hindus, on their way back from the meeting, had been waylaid andkilled by angry Muslims, who threw the corpses in the Jauli canal. By midnight, the anti-Muslim violence had begun. By themorning of 8 September, when some forces finally received orders to act, over 50 people had already been murdered, anumber of women allegedly raped, and several thousand people displaced.

The GPS-enabled police vehicles and CCTVs Yadav had talked of so glowingly in his NASSCOM speech had never seemedless relevant. “The local administration and the Lucknow headquarters were receiving minute-by-minute updates for twoweeks before the incident,” an additional superintendent of police who was present in the Muzaffarnagar area on the day ofthe mahapanchayat told me. “We did not need GPS. We needed orders.”

The state government’s response to the violence was sullen and defensive. It had been slow to defend those under attack,and seemed slower still to galvanise relief for the affected. Yadav himself visited Muzaffarnagar on 15 September, over a weekafter the riot had broken out. He made boilerplate statements to the press at the time. Two days later, when he updated hisFacebook status, he seemed not to be thinking about it at all. His post read, simply: “Life is mobile.”

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Yadav’s state, the world’s most populous local unit, is home to some of India’s poorest people, and some of its most deeplyentrenched social conflicts. Police violence, often reported with an ugly dimension of casteism to it, is a fact of life. Anti-casteand pro-poor politics have a long and vibrant history here; so, however, does a deeply entrenched culture of caste and genderviolence.

For several years, rural Uttar Pradesh had escaped the scars of major religious riots. Following the great churn of 1992, whenHindutva activists led by senior BJP politicians demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the state’s villages escaped massviolence. The divisive but massively influential Mulayam Singh, who founded the Samajwadi Party just months before themosque’s destruction, has often been seen as key to that precarious stability. The Samajwadi Party itself was founded on thebasis of a powerful voter alliance between Hindu Yadavs and Muslims, a compact that more or less held even in the face ofstrong political opposition and successive electoral defeats.

Now, thanks to one of the worst incidents of anti-Muslim violence in the state’s history, this accord seemed to be in danger offailing, and the party exposed for its opportunism and incompetence. Sure enough, when general elections rolled around in2014, the Samajwadis were crushed. The BJP, which had won 10 seats out of the state’s 80 in the 2009 elections, won astaggering 71 this time around.

Meanwhile, Yadav continued to inaugurate projects in Noida in absentia, mostly from his Lucknow residence. According toofficial reports, he has launched a women’s helpline, 1,056 GPS-enabled SUVs for police to improve the law and order of thestate, and 300 air-conditioned ambulances. He has distributed over 1.5 million laptops to students.

Yadav first made his mark as a popular leader in 2008, when he led statewide student protests against the Mayawati regime,ensuring that he would be the obvious candidate for a fresh face when the beleaguered Samajwadi Party began to look fornew representatives. His yen for technological solutions, and image as the clean young politician who enjoys the support ofUttar Pradesh’s youth, continues to sustain his reputation to some extent.

But his personal attributes, and his family connections, remain the most recognisable thing about him. Over the course ofseveral months, I interviewed more than 60 people, including Yadav’s friends, family, party members, bureaucrats and politicalrivals. The same adjectives came up repeatedly as they described him: well-behaved, respectful, gracious, and sharif, orcourteous. The former Samajwadi Party leader Shahid Siddiqui said that his problem is that he is “too sharif to run agovernment.”

This may be why he appears to have others to do it for him. When Akhilesh was sworn in, it was reported as a foregoneconclusion that the real power would still be held by party veterans—his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav; his uncles, ShivpalYadav and Ram Gopal Yadav; and Mulayam Singh’s close ally, Azam Khan, one of the most influential Muslim politicians innorthern India. Three years into his term, the general view is still that this division of power remains in place, with the additionof the senior bureaucrat, Anita Singh, said to command a great deal of power on the pancham tal.

Yet Akhilesh’s critics see him as a symbol for the deterioration of Samajwadi politics into incompetence and opportunism—afeeling rooted in the visible growth of caste-related crimes, increasing complaints against the malfunctioning machinery of lawand order, and a sense that after three years in power, the chief minister has earned the blame for being unable to takedecisive action in these matters.

The last relief camps for the displaced of Muzaffarnagar were vacated in January 2014, around the time the Yadav family wasbusy with the annual Saifai Mahotsav, a glitzy cultural festival held in their hometown. The Mahotsav was attended by theentire extended Yadav clan, as well as some of Uttar Pradesh’s most influential ministers and bureaucrats. Seven planes werechartered to fly in celebrities. Salman Khan, who once campaigned against the Samajwadi Party in 2009, performed on stagewith Madhuri Dixit. Faced with criticism, Akhilesh defended the spectacle. “The Mahotsav has proved as a platform to promoteyouth power,” he said. “Don’t the people in the villages have the right to enjoy?”

His personal recognition of a “right to enjoy” may have endeared him to some sections of his electorate, but it has earned himthe name “Mauj Masti Baba”—the fun-and-games kid—among some of his bureaucrats. A senior Urdu-language journalistcharacterised it as part of the “Modi-fication” of India’s chief ministers, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who waschief minister of Gujarat for 13 years: “Where there are no ethical priciples in the pursuit of development, the competition is aclash of personalities in the elections, and there is no correlation between the façade of progress that is built up, and thefigures.”

A former Samajwadi member, who left the party in 2013, had a more personal view of things. “Akhilesh’s strength is that he isnot a fanatic but a relatively harmless person,” this person said. “At the same time, he is a mediocrity. He is only motivated byhis promotion in the party, rather than any ideology. That is why his individual actions are inane. But collectively, they create adestructive system in which he is actually complicit.”



THE CHAMBAL RIVER, which begins in the northern Vindhyas, empties into the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh. In the Mahabharat,the Chambal is called the Charmanyavati: a river formed by the blood of the thousands of animals sacrificed by the Aryan kingRantideva. Over hundreds of years, its water has eroded the soft lands through which it flows, forming deep and high ravines.For at least a century, the ravines have been the battlefields on which rebels and bandits wage war against upper-castelandowners and their forces.

This landscape, mysterious and sinister to many Indians who know of it only through newspaper reports, is a stone’s throwaway from the little village of Saifai, which falls in Etawah district in central Uttar Pradesh. Here, Mulayam Singh Yadav, a self-proclaimed political heir to the great Indian socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, and three-time chief minister of UttarPradesh, was born in 1939. Akhilesh Yadav was also born here, in 1973, the same year that an 11-year-old Phoolan Devi,later to become a gun-toting outlaw of Chambal legend—and Akhilesh’s Samajwadi Party colleague in parliament—wasmarried off to a man much older than her.

Mulayam Singh himself had been married as a child, and nearly 16 years passed between the wedding with Malti Devi, andthe birth of their first child, Akhilesh. Tragically, the birth caused severe medical complications for Malti Devi, who wasrendered permanently unresponsive, and possibly in persistent vegetative state. A person with close personal andprofessional links to Mulayam Singh, who told me the story, said that she had become “a vegetable” after delivering her son.

Mulayam Singh had already been elected as a member of the legislative assembly of Uttar Pradesh for Lohia’s own SamyuktaSocialist Party, which made him a busy man in Lucknow. He did not attend the birth, and appears not to have visited his familyvery often in the years to follow. When the baby was a year old, Mulayam Singh was re-elected as the assemblyrepresentative from Jaswantnagar constituency, a seat he held seven times until 1996. (The incumbent MLA, who has heldthe seat for four consecutive terms, is his brother Shivpal, the second-most powerful leader in the Samajwadi Party.)

The boy was brought up by his paternal grandparents, a rural farming couple with no education. They neither paid muchattention to his date of birth or a formal name for him. A village elder in Saifai told me that he was known simply as “Tipu,” anickname bestowed on him by the village pradhan. Parcelled out to relatives, Tipu’s early education was divided between alocal Saifai school, and one in Etawah town.

He found an older companion in Shivpal, who had just passed out of school at the time. The two spent hours in the potatofields around their home. (In August 2014, Akhilesh’s government announced that it would put some of those potatoes to useby setting up an Rs 800-crore vodka plant in the vicinity.)

When Indira Gandhi’s government declared an Emergency in 1975, Mulayam Singh was arrested and held in custody for 19months. A friend of his sister’s family accompanied Tipu to help admit him to St Mary’s school in Etawah. The enrollmentofficial suggested that it was not a good idea to put a nickname on the school roster, so the friend came up with somesuggestions for an official first name, and Tipu chose “Akhilesh.” In later years, Akhilesh told journalists in Lucknow that hisdate of birth was registered as 1 July 1973, picked to coincide with the first day of the academic session.

Until the mid-1980s, Mulayam Singh’s socialist politics did not embed itself deeply in Etawah. Here, the Congress party hadlong held sway among three of Uttar Pradesh’s most influential voting constituencies: Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims. Electionshad long been a messy affair in the state, mired in poverty and feudal patterns of land ownership. Often, wealthy upper-castelandlords and politicians attempted to influence outcomes by using dacoits to wreak violence on the region’s lower-castemajority. But just over a decade into Mulayam Singh’s political career, two forces had upset this pattern of intimidation andcontrol.

The first was the rise of OBC assertiveness in opposition to the Congress, led by men such as Chaudhary Charan Singh, theJat leader who briefly became prime minister in 1979, and “Netaji,” as Mulayam Singh himself came to be called. The secondwas the growing strength of dacoits from backward castes, fighting to assert control over land and political power. WhenAkhilesh was eight years old, Phoolan Devi—who was born into the Mallah sub-caste, also classified as OBC in Uttar Pradesh—achieved notoriety for the vengeance her gang of outlaws extracted for her rape, killing 22 Thakur men from Behmai village.It was 1982; the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, VP Singh of the Congress, ordered a crackdown on the region’s dacoits, andparty forces and state police responded with ferocity.

The following year, Mulayam Singh sent Akhilesh to Dholpur Military School in Rajasthan. In Winds of Change, her biographyof Akhilesh, the journalist Sunita Aron writes that Mulayam Singh, who had been a wrestler in his early years, was convincedby a friend that the disciplined atmosphere of a military school would be good for his son. Still, it was Shivpal who went withAkhilesh to complete the admission procedures.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote his daughter enough letters from prison to fill a book. By contrast,Mulayam Singh remained a distant figure to Akhilesh; he visited him only twice in all his years at school. Aron writes thatMulayam Singh “wrote his son a letter in school which could have easily been a telegram. It said: Padhney mein mehnat karo.



Kaam aayega. (Study hard. It will help you).”

In Lucknow on school vacations, Akhilesh frequently found himself in an empty house, in which the only other people he sawwere the sort who were not meant to sit down with him: police constables, office staff, housekeepers and orderlies. No amountof socialist egalitarianism could bridge the gaps of an essentially old-fashioned arrangement. “He was a minister’s son,” one ofthe orderlies who worked in this house told me. “We couldn’t call him by his name so we started to call him bhaiya”—brother.

On one such vacation in 1988, according to a person close to the family, Akhilesh met Sadhana Gupta, a former civil servantwho was to be acknowledged as Mulayam Singh’s wife in 2007. “It is only after Sadhana’s entry in his life, he became the chiefminister. So Mulayam considers her lucky,” this person told me. The teenaged Akhilesh, however, did not get along withGupta, and allegedly slapped her at one point in the holiday. After this, “Akhilesh was constantly seen as a disturbance inNetaji’s life,” the family friend said, “and was packed off from one place to the other.”

In 1989, Mulayam Singh, as leader of the Janata Dal party, became chief minister, just as India entered a period of turbulencewhose effects still mark the country’s political life. That November, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ordered the controversial“shilanyas,” a ceremony to break ground, for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, near the Babri Masjid. The following year, right-wingfactions led by the BJP began to clamour for the demolition of the mosque, which they claimed had been constructed over thetrue birthplace of Ram, and Mulayam Singh earned the scornful title of “Mullah Mulayam” for his famous promise to protect theBabri Masjid. “Yahaan parinda bhi parr nahin maar sakta,” he said—not even a bird may flap its wings over the mosque.

It was a crucial moment in the forging of the Yadav-Muslim alliance. However, a spooked Congress, fearful of losing its upper-caste Hindu voters, withdrew support to Mulayam Singh’s government, and he lost his position in 1991. The BJP, which seizedits chance to form the government, propped up its own OBC leader, Kalyan Singh, in Lucknow instead. In October 1992,Mulayam Singh formally announced his new samajwadi, or socialist party. Just months later, on 6 December, rampagingcrowds destroyed the Babri Masjid.

By this time, Akhilesh, nearly 20, had been sent on from Dholpur to an engineering college in Mysore. He told his biographer,Sunita Aron, that he found out about the new party through a report in the Deccan Herald.

He remained in Karnataka for the next few years, even as the political cauldrons of Delhi and Lucknow simmered. MulayamSingh was now in the thick of coalition-building at the centre, as successive governments came to power and fell for lack ofsupport. Mulayam Singh even staked his claim to become prime minister of a Janata Dal-led coalition, but lost out, first to HDDeve Gowda, and then to IK Gujral. When Akhilesh returned to Lucknow in 1996, a full-fledged engineer, Mulayam Singh wasdefence minister in the United Front coalition government.

One October evening that year, a group of journalists were celebrating a birthday at a restaurant in Lucknow’s Taj hotel. Ayoung man with a cloth towel slung around his neck swaggered into the quiet, upscale environs. He went up to the restaurant’spiano, asked the seated pianist to make room for him, and then started to bash away at it. The manager moved the group ofjournalists to another restaurant. A week later, a small snippet about the whimsy of the defence minister’s son made its way tothe pages of India Today. “That year, he was packed off to Australia to do his masters in environmental engineering,” a familyfriend told me.

The transformation of caste politics in Uttar Pradesh also threw up a formidable rival to the Samajwadi Party. The BahujanSamaj Party was founded in 1984 by the Dalit leader Kanshi Ram and led, after his death, by Mayawati, under whose rule theBSP achieved unprecedented electoral success. Between 1995 and 2012, Mayawati served four times as chief minister, thelast of these a full five-year term with a single-party majority between 2007 and 2012. (Akhilesh sometimes refers to her as“bua,” or aunt, in conversation with journalists.)

In countering her, Akhilesh came to be the visible face of the Samajwadi Party on the ground, and a viable candidate for thechange of guard that the party had come to realise it desperately needed. As a grown-up, he had undergone his owntransformation of sorts. He was elected twice to parliament from Kannauj in central Uttar Pradesh, and had become a marriedman and father. Since 1999, the year he returned to India from Sydney and became an MP, he had largely based himself inDelhi. He made little news other than the odd item in the society pages.

Then, in February 2007, Mulayam Singh filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court, which publicly acknowledged his wifeSadhana and son Prateek for the first time. The affidavit was filed as part of a case alleging that the Yadav family held assetsdisproportionate to their income. A preliminary report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in July 2007 revealed thatMulayam Singh and Sadhana were married, although it does not reveal the exact date of this marriage. (Malti Devi, Akhilesh’smother, died in 2003.) The report went on to state that Prateek Yadav is Sadhana’s son “from her earlier marriage. She wasmarried to Chandra Prakash Gupta in July 1986 and Prateek was born on July 7, 1987. She divorced him on March 5, 1990.”

Several people, including three members of the Samajwadi Party, told me that Mulayam Singh’s official acknowledgment of a



second wife and son in the affidavit made Akhilesh desperate to wield influence in Lucknow. He now wished to beacknowledged as a force in the Samjawadi Party, and Mulayam Singh’s heir.

“‘Youth’ is all he had that was unique in the feudal, patriarchal party,” a veteran journalist covering the state for a nationalnewspaper said to me. This was literally true. Akhilesh was now notionally the head of the party’s four youth wings—the YuvjanSabha, Lohia Vahini, Samajwadi Chhatra Sabha and Mulayam Singh Youth Brigade, but he had been only occasionallyinvolved in their activities. Around this time, news of brutal violence on Indian students in Australia was making headlines inIndia. For some years, the nativism of the Mumbai-based politician Raj Thackeray had been making national headlines, as hewhipped up sentiment against migrant workers from UP and Bihar with calls of “Bhaiya Bhagao, Maharashtra Bachao”—chaseoff the bhaiyas, save Maharashtra. According to Anand Bhadauria, head of the Lohia Vahini, this inspired Akhilesh’sinvolvement at ground level. He started to call up several students across the state, and formulated a plan to take control ofyouth forces.

The Samajwadi Party has nurtured local student politics since inception; it wields influence on its support base of young menthrough the rhetoric of machismo and caste power. This was not an area in which Mayawati commanded much strength. TheBSP has never had a powerful students’ wing; its core vote base of Dalits has few educational opportunities in Uttar Pradesh,and relatively few political platforms to engage with at the student level. As chief minister in 2002, Mayawati capped the age forstudent elections in Uttar Pradesh. This struck a direct blow to career student politicians, many of whom are enrolled in collegefor years at a time, seeking a chance to lead students’ unions, and to leapfrog from there to full-fledged party politics.

Her approach to student politics gave Akhilesh an opening to stake his claim to power on the ground in Uttar Pradesh. InJanuary 2008, a BSP minister, Nakul Dubey, scheduled a visit to Lucknow’s Kanyakubj College. In response, one of its studentleaders organised a protest, against fee hikes, and a ban on student union elections that Mayawati had imposed the previousyear. This leader was Sunil Yadav, who went on to become the national president of the Samajwadi Chhatra Sabha, and isone of Akhilesh’s right-hand men.

“We planned this with Bhaiya earlier,” Yadav recalled of the protest. “The moment Bhaiya gave me a go-ahead on the phonefrom Delhi, I led a group of students to display black flags to Nakul Dubey.” Chaos ensued, as policemen charged the studentswith batons. Almost simultaneously, students in the state’s other cities spilled out of their classrooms in protest. Sunil Yadav,bleeding heavily from his forehead, appeared on televisions everywhere in the state.

The following day, Akhilesh reached Lucknow to join the protests, and was arrested, along with 30,000 other students aroundthe state. The situation on the ground began to resemble a riot, and the BSP could not help but look autocratic, caught on theback foot. As Sunil Yadav put it, the “bhaiya peedhi,” or generation of young men, had made its mark.

The bhaiya peedhi became Akhilesh’s local support group, and helped define his political identity. He had never been tocollege in Uttar Pradesh, but in some ways, his lack of insider clout made his approach seem refreshing. With his new coterieof young men, he was courteous and chatty, dispensing advice on cars and bikes with the best mileage, and opinions aboutcricket. “He was, in the true sense, everyone’s bhaiya,” Sunil said. “Every single youth wing member can call him on thephone. Which senior leader remembers the name of all his workers? He does.”

These new loyalists became links in a network on which Akhilesh still relies. An officer in the Lucknow police’s LocalIntelligence Unit told me that to this day, if news comes in of trouble from anywhere in the state, Akhilesh cross-checks hisinformation with the local contacts he made during the 2008 student protest.

The Samajwadi Party’s fortunes improved in time for the 2009 general elections. Akhilesh himself contested those polls fromtwo constituencies, won both, and had to give up one—the old Samajwadi bastion of Firozabad. Much to its surprise, however,the party lost that by-election; and the consequences of that result came to be a turning point in Akhilesh’s career.

In 1995, just before leaving for Sydney, Akhilesh had met a Lucknow schoolgirl named Dimple Rawat, with whom he stayed intouch through his time in Australia, and wished to marry when he returned. Several people told me that Mulayam disapprovedof a match between his Yadav son and a Pahari Thakur from Uttarakhand—a community with which Mulayam Singh had comeinto friction in the past. The potential damage to the family’s reputation with their OBC electorate was of grave concern.Akhilesh threatened rebellion, but found support from an unexpected quarter—Mulayam Singh’s close ally, the formerCongress leader and businessman Amar Singh.

Singh, a Thakur himself, joined the Samajwadi Party in 1996. He was directly routed to the Rajya Sabha, much to thediscomfort of party old-timers, who saw his steep ascendancy as a betrayal of their Lohiaite, socialist principles. But MulayamSingh seemed to trust him to navigate the capital’s political circles successfully, and gave him charge of the party’s affairs inDelhi.

The numerous stories I was told about Singh made it clear that between 1996 and 2010, the years of his formal association



with the Samajwadis, he brought major change both to the party, and in Mulayam Singh’s family. Akhilesh allegedly told anactivist who has met him several times, “Khatiye pe sone waale mere baap ko five star ki aadat laga di”—he put my father,who needed only a simple cot to sleep on, in the habit of five-star hotels.

According to a Lucknow-based newspaper editor, Singh had convinced Mulayam Singh to send Akhilesh to Australia after thepiano-bashing incident, and worked hard to ensure public legitimacy for Sadhana and Prateek. In 1999, when Akhileshthreatened to go against his father’s wishes to marry Dimple, Singh was instrumental in convincing Mulayam Singh to let themarriage take place, persuading him that the match represented an opportunity to reach out to Thakur voters, this editor said.Akhilesh and Dimple were married in November that year, soon after he became an MP.

Meanwhile, Singh transformed the outlook and functioning of the party in many ways. As chairman of the UP DevelopmentCouncil, he exercised his considerable skills at lobbying to rope in support from some of the country’s top industrialists andmovie stars, including Adi Godrej, Anil Ambani, Kumaramangalam Birla and Amitabh Bachchan, all of whom were nominatedto the council. “Amar Singh’s entry made money-making the focus and corruption an honest endeavour in the party,” theformer party member Shahid Siddiqui told me. Singh was responsible for the Samajwadi Party’s increasingly conspiciousconsumption, much to the disdain of some of the party’s veterans, dyed-in-the-wool Lohiaites, to whom I spoke about thisperiod. Nowhere was this more apparent than Singh’s big push for the Saifai Mahotsav in Mulayam and Akhilesh’s homevillage, an annual cultural extravaganza at which major Hindi movie stars perform regularly.

What I understood from my conversations with these Samajwadi Party veterans, however, was that the widespreaddissatisfaction with Singh chiefly sprang from the fact that he had blocked the rest of the leadership from access to MulayamSingh. This was a blow that many felt personally: Mulayam Singh’s considerable interpersonal skills had knit the partytogether. Further, none of Singh’s glamour was helping the party through the 2000s. As Mayawati grew from strength tostrength, her 2007 electoral strategy, the “sarvajan samaj,” based on an unprecedented Brahmin-Dalit voter alliance, becamea blow to the Samajwadi Party’s traditional arrangements, and they failed to recover in time for the 2009 Lok Sabha polls.

Unlike most of his party colleagues, Akhilesh’s seat was secure, and doubly so. He contested and won the 2009 polls fromboth Kannauj and Firozabad, and decided to stay with the former. Firozabad is an old party bastion—its current MP is RamGopal Yadav’s son and Akhilesh’s cousin, Akshay—but the 2009 by-election resulted in a stunning upset for the party, as theCongress’s candidate, the former actor Raj Babbar, handed a crushing defeat to the Samajwadi Party nominee, Akhilesh’swife, Dimple.

Singh had been responsible for persuading the party to put Dimple up for the Firozabad by-poll. Babbar and he were oldrivals. Babbar had once belonged to the Samajwadi Party, but he had been fired in 2006 over a dispute about electoral ticketswith Singh. “Amar Singh anyway took it upon his ego to engineer a crushing defeat for Babbar,” one senior Samajwadi Partyleader told me. “He proposed Dimple’s name. He thought she will be the safest candidate since she is from the family.”

But Singh’s missteps during the campaign proved costly. In a Muslim-majority area, his decision to bring into the party KalyanSingh—formerly the BJP chief minister who presided over the Masjid demolition—went down poorly. A movie star inadvertentlycontributed to his downfall, too: several people told me that Singh alienated Muslim voters by speaking slightingly of one ofBabbar’s campaigners, Salman Khan. Fans of Khan, who commands a legendary loyalty from his followers around thecountry, may have found this as urgent an electoral issue as any other, judging from accounts of the time. At any rate, Dimplewas defeated, and Singh suddenly found himself out in the cold.

SOON AFTER THE BY-ELECTION, the party started inviting applications for tickets for the 2012 assembly polls. Akhilesh began tolook into these applications personally, joining senior party members as they interviewed prospective candidates. By this time,many party leaders understood that something was badly wrong with their old strategems. A leader who was present at aninternal review meeting after the 2009 Lok Sabha election recalled that Amar Singh, excoriating them for being out of touch,had asked the assembled group: “Do any of you know who Hannah Montana is?” No one did. Singh allegedly said, “AskAkhilesh. He knows. That’s why we need the young generation leading the party.”

Akhilesh, perhaps unwilling to rest on his laurels as the resident Disney expert, commissioned a round of surveys thatconclusively established that voters were now seeing Samajwadi rule as a form of “goonda raj”—thug rule. He tried tominimise this, denying tickets to candidates whose chargesheets were hard to ignore, such as DP Yadav, accused in multiplemurder cases. Out of 403 candidates, the party eventually fielded 85 who were under 40 years old. (In spite of efforts to cleanup its image, however, the party still fielded the most candidates with criminal cases to their name in the 2012 polls.)

Through the year, relations with Amar Singh deteriorated swiftly. According to one Samajwadi Party leader who has been amember of parliament, Akhilesh’s uncle Ram Gopal, who disliked Amar Singh, invested all his energies in grooming Akhilesh toassume power. This former MP said that Akhilesh in turn, took radical measures to ensure that Mulayam Singh’s security andhis staff cut all communication, including phone calls, between Mulayam and Amar Singh. In January 2010, Singh and his ally,



the former actor Jaya Prada, resigned from the party, and were formally expelled from the party a year later, for their “attemptto sully the party’s secular and socialist image.” The secretary to a senior Samajwadi Party leader claimed that Singh had beensacrificed to demonstrate that the party was turning a new leaf.

Preparing for a starring role in the push for victory, Akhilesh handpicked a team of professionals to design his campaign. Theyincluded the film music composer Nikhil Kamat, part of Hindi cinema’s composer duo, Nikhil-Vinay. The journalist and radioshow host Neelesh Mishra wrote songs, and came up with the tagline “Ummeed ki Cycle”—a reference to the SamajwadiParty’s electoral symbol, the bicycle. Arjun Sablok, director of the Hindi film Neal & Nikki, took charge of the ad campaign.

In February 2011, Akhilesh was formally elected as the UP state president of the party. The following month, the SamajwadiParty launched a massive campaign targeting the BSP, decrying the “deterioration in law and order, crimes against women,”and widespread corruption. As if to confirm their accusations of repressive state power, Mayawati placed Mulayam Singh andAkhilesh under house arrest in March that year, ahead of their planned agitation. But this backfired. The arrests unleashedviolent protests across the state, and the issue was raised in parliament.

The BSP lifted the arrests, but held Akhilesh twice more in the next ten days. In their book describing the run-up to theelection, Battleground UP, Manish Tiwari and Rajan Pandey write that the Mayawati government “could not control thethousands of SP workers who had come out in the streets in various cities to burn Mayawati’s effigies, despite police threats.Sitting in his party office, Akhilesh Yadav was flooded with phone calls from across the state informing him about the protestsheld by Samajwadi activists. Yadav looked elated with his party’s show of strength. And there was a sense of contentmentwithin the party as well. The new leadership had finally delivered.”

Akhilesh’s campaign involved a bicycle yatra through rural Uttar Pradesh, accompanied by a motorcade. The stategovernment denied him permission to carry out one such yatra on the spleet-new Noida-Agra Expressway. “Bhaiya then toldus, let us go under the flyover through the muddy alleys,” Anand Bhadauria, one of Akhilesh’s companions on the ride, toldme. “He said that one day, he would inaugurate the Expressway. Which he did later.” During this yatra, Akhilesh’s step-brother, Prateek, married Aparna Bisht, the daughter of a well-known Lucknow journalist. Aparna is also a Pahari Thakur, butthis time, perhaps predictably, Mulayam Singh had no objection to the match.

Ashish Yadav, who is now the party’s media manager, told me that on counting day in March 2012, Mulayam Singh asked himthrice if they would win. That evening, once results were announced, the movie starlet Zayed Khan dropped in at partyheadquarters to congratulate Akhilesh personally. “Do you know who that was?” Ashish says he asked Akhilesh. The chiefminister-elect nodded, and gnomically quoted Ashish a line from the 2008 Hindi film Fashion. “Kehte hain success ki seedhichadte hue jin logon se mulaqat hoti hai, wahi log phir se seedhi utarte hue bhi milte hain.”—they say that the people you meetwhile climbing the ladder of success are the same ones you encounter on your way down.

MOST OF THE UTTAR PRADESH bureaucrats and political workers I contacted for this story were easily reachable viaWhatsApp or SMS. (Almost no state bureaucrat ever responded to an email.) Several of my interviewees had taken to loopingme into their WhatsApp forwarding circles. I became a regular object of flirtation for many of these people, who sent meamateurish love poetry and romantic shayari—in Uttar Pradesh, a standard way for men to interact with women who aren’trelated or otherwise closely known to them. One party worker even told me that a person whose texts I had steadfastlyrefrained from replying to told the party worker not to talk to me, as I was a “characterless” woman.

“Characterless” is a popular insult for women in these circles; one of my interviewees, a former member of the state’s women’scommission, confessed to me that she was branded characterless when she refused to accompany a male senior on a daura,or tour—a codeword for getting out of town to have sex. This was “not because you refused,” she said. “But it is assumed thatyou are already sleeping with someone else.”

I had made casual mention of the WhatsApp texts in a conversation with Ashish Yadav. Just as I was winding up the lastinterviews for the story, my phone buzzed with a text from Akhilesh Yadav’s personal number. He was agreeing to interviewrequests I had made a month earlier. I called Ashish for details. He said that he had mentioned the shayari problem to“Bhaiya,” who had been deeply embarrassed to hear it, and decided to grant me an appointment.

In early July, I arrived at the chief minister’s residence in Lucknow an hour ahead of our scheduled meeting, and waited in thehuge lobby, newly redecorated with traditional chikan fabrics. At the far end of the ceiling, a tidy sculpture made of junk cycleparts was suspended in the air, lit in such a way that its shadow on the near wall formed the shape of Mulayam Singh’s face. Ihad been told that after his swearing-in, Akhilesh had stripped the house of its blue tiles—a colour associated with hispredecessor’s BSP—and redone the whole house.

In an hour, I was called into a large office, which overlooked a lawn with a football goalpost at one end. On the shelves behindthe long, unoccupied desk, I spotted an embossed image of Lohia; small idols of Sai Baba and Vishnu; a golden globe; and abottle of Chanel Bleu perfume. A stack of books included HG Wells’ s The New Machiavelli, and biographies of Benazir Bhutto



and APJ Abdul Kalam. I craned my neck to try and read the labels on the files stacked neatly on the desk, but the chiefminister walked in before I could manage.

Yadav spoke in both Hindi and English to me. He flat-out refused to answer any questions I had about his childhood orpersonal history. He asked me to “write about government” instead. “I am not saying that it has been a long journey,” he said,“but I certainly got to see so much.” He began to speak, quickly and without pause, about the difficulties of understanding UttarPradesh and its politics, and the inflation of his responsibilities over time. “While you and I are talking, we are celebrating WorldPopulation Day. During the metro programme today I said in my speech that we need the metro, because the population isincreasing.”

Without waiting for prompts in the form of my questions, he explained many of the schemes and improvements that the partyhad promised in its election manifesto, all of which he claimed it had kept—the laptops, the new schools and colleges, theelectricity supply, the highways, free irrigation. “We have passed all those tests,” he claimed. “I would say we have done all thework and are taking Utta Pardes on the path of core development.” His dialect of Hindi, like Mulayam Singh’s, transforms thestate’s name to “Utta Pardes.”

At a break in the proceedings, I asked him to list three of his major achievements as chief minister. “Three majorachievements I will tell you,” he said, before I had finished my question, and gave me the government line: infrastructure,health and social schemes.

His optimistic pitch for the government’s performance is not entirely borne out by facts. The problem is compounded becauseofficial documentation of social ills and injustice has often proved questionable in Uttar Pradesh. Take, as one example, thequestion of farmer suicides. The official Uttar Pradesh figure, released in April 2014, was 80 such deaths in 2013. Yet aNational Crime Records Bureau report claimed that 750 farmers committed suicide in the state that year. In April this year, thestate government received a grant of Rs490 crore from the centre to distribute as compensation for the loss of crops inunseasonal weather. It reached farmers late; some cultivators found that they had been disbursed no more than Rs100.Others got even less.

Farmer suicides were a national problem, Akhilesh acknowledged. “We have helped families of those who have committedsuicide. But what has the central government done? They should also say that they have helped.” Fluctuating sugar prices, hesaid, had been destructive for the state’s sugar farmers—the riot-torn areas of western Uttar Pradesh are part of one of India’slargest sugarcane belts—and his government was doing their best to ensure that farmers were paid. “We are giving themmoney from our own budget. Sugar mills should work, rates should be controlled, payments should be made,” he said. “Butthe centre has to step in.” His government had written to the centre so often for help, he said, that he would “compile abooklet” of the letters and give it to me.

“Same people voted for us”—in the assembly elections—“and for you”—he meant the BJP in 2014’s Lok Sabha elections.“Your MPs won by a larger number. Now why don’t you work for development?”

Like many chief ministers, Akhilesh has not been immune to the dream of re-fashioning his capital city as a global metropolis:once, early in his term, he allegedly told listeners in a closed-door meeting that he would make Lucknow Singapore, so thatwhen rural migrants visited, they would spread the word through the region of how adept the government was at development.In July 2012, he commissioned a R102-crore project called the Lucknow Eye, along the lines of the London Eye. The head ofthe Lucknow Development Authority called it Akhilesh’s “dream project.”

Akhilesh’s image as the technology-loving modern man has taken occasional blows. At a conclave held in Delhi in June 2014,20 investors from the United States confirmed an investment of Rs20,000 crore in the state. Since their preliminary meetingtook place with the senior bureaucrat Alok Ranjan, the investors also wanted to meet Akhilesh. During the meeting, which tookplace in Lucknow, the investors made presentations about the kinds of projects they had in mind. Akhilesh allegedlyinterjected, at one point: “So you are from New York? You have the Statue of Liberty there, no? Can’t we have something likethat in Lucknow?” A bureaucrat who was present at the meeting and told me this story claimed that the investors wereshocked at this apparent frivolity.

One of the principal secretaries I spoke to had told me that Akhilesh perpetually looked at his phone during meetings,sometimes pausing to read out jokes he had received on WhatsApp. When he started swiping through his phone during ourinterview, however, it was to read a news item off his screen to me: “Mainpuri will progress at the speed of the Expressway.The Expressway is 102-kilometre long. Ten districts and 232 villages will be covered including 19 villages from Mainpuri. Therewill be 13 small and 52 large bridges with four big vegetable selling points. Ponds have been dug up on the way forbeautification.”

He read, paused to explain the scheme to me, then read again. “I’ve had all of them dug, small and big,” he said, pausing.“There will be medical and engineering colleges and shopping malls,” he read. Pause. “We will only provide space and



regulate. There will be tenders for private players.”

He read further. “Two lakh plants will be planted along the way.” He stopped again. “Just two lakhs? We will plant crores ofthem.”

The question of whether Uttar Pradesh can accommodate the sort of business promised by big investments and high-octanepublicity largely remained unanswered—not only by Akhilesh, but also by my other interviewees. A person who works as agovernment contractor in the state’s irrigation department was pessimistic. It was not as though the Mayawati government wasclean, he told me. Any sign-off on a project had always required an advance commission of ten percent, he alleged: fivepercent would go to the party fund, and the rest distributed between the concerned legislators and bureaucrats.

But in the Samajwadi regime, he said, there was no longer a fixed percentage he could factor into his calculations: acommission could range from 10 to 65 percent. It helped, after a fashion, to be a Yadav. (He is a Yadav himself.) “And if youare a Yadav who can pay more commission than the other Yadav who has been assigned the project, it will be handed over toyou instead,” he added. “The other Yadav won’t even get back his advance commission.”

IN JANUARY 2013, ten months after Akhilesh became chief minister, a group of activists met him with a request to consider theimplementation of the food security legislation in the state. “A 35-minute meeting was granted. He spent 20 minutesinterrogating Jean Drèze”—the Belgian-origin economist—“on how he could speak Hindi so well,” the activist who has met himseveral times, and was present at this meeting, told me. “For a trained engineer, he could not make sense of the maps weshowed him. When we pointed out that the malnutrition rate in Uttar Pradesh was high, he said ‘Accha, UP is lower than Biharalso?’” The activists told him that Uttar Pradesh would be able to implement the Right to Food Act in the state much before theUnited Progressive Alliance government at the centre would be able to do so. The activist says that Akhilesh then looked at NCBajpai, the head of the State Planning Commission and said, “You know our Food and Civil Supplies Minister. Only Netaji canconvince him.” He was referring to Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as Raja Bhaiya, an MLA who heads a group ofindependent Thakur legislators, who were key to the Samajwadi Party’s government formation.

Akhilesh’s deference and lack of assertion make a striking contrast to Mulayam Singh’s command of a large and disparategroup of powerful political actors under the Samajwadi Party umbrella. A text I was sent early on in my reporting read: “Kyun reSambha, kitne chief minister thhe?,” or “Why, Sambha, how many chief ministers were there?”—parodying the famous linefrom Sholay. (Lowbrow political comedy is as common as flowery shayari on WhatsApp.) I repeated the joke to a principalsecretary in the state government whom I met that afternoon. He laughed and supplied the punchline before I could. “Theanswer is 5.5.” The state’s five chief ministers, the joke goes, are Mulayam Singh, Shivpal, Ram Gopal, Azam Khan, and theprincipal secretary to the chief minister, Anita Singh. Akhilesh brings up the rear as the point-five chief minister.

In contrast to his father’s rule, that of Akhilesh was marked from the very beginning by the evidence of a fractured centre ofpower. Mulayam Singh looms large over Uttar Pradesh, and much of the power in the government and administration remainsin the hands of allies and cronies of his generation, rather than the “bhaiya peedhi.” Shivpal holds the portfolios of the PublicWorks Department, as well as Irrigation, Revenue, Land Development and Water Resources. Ram Gopal has represented theSamajwadis in both houses of parliament, and holds the party’s brief in Delhi—something for which, I was told, he had foughtAmar Singh hard. Both have sons also closely involved with the party, and may well be rivals to Akhilesh in the future. Khan, afounding member of the Samajwadi Party, exerts the single greatest influence any politician currently has on the region’sMuslims. He runs his home constituency of Rampur like a fiefdom, a former Samajwadi leader told me: “He wants to be thepatriarch of the Muslim community.”

The Samajwadi Party’s leaders all derive their significance from tremendously loyal support bases, and the ability to formstrategic alliances. When Akhilesh came to power, the general impression in Lucknow was that he was neither able tocompete with his elders, nor capable of rising above the usual bureaucratic games of appointments and transfers. “The fact isthat he does not even want to go beyond it,” a senior bureaucrat who has worked in the chief minister’s offices told me.

But Akhilesh’s rivals are not limited to men of his father’s generation. Writing in FirstPost in March 2013, the journalist AlkaPandey quoted an unnamed union minister visiting Lucknow, who was asked for his opinions on the Akhilesh Yadavgovernment. “Earlier we had the impression that there were multiple chief ministers in the state,” Pandey quoted this ministeras saying, “but now what we see is that there is someone who supersedes even the real chief minister.” Pandey claimed thatthe minister was clearly referring to Anita Singh, who works with Akhilesh but is widely seen as personally loyal to MulayamSingh and his wife Sadhana. It appears that this has put her at odds with her boss: a young member of the party who is part ofAkhilesh’s core team told me this summer that the chief minister and the bureaucrat had not met for almost a year.

This core team member told me a story that demonstrated the game of one-upmanship in which Anita Singh and Akhilesh hadengaged from early on in his chief-ministerial term. On 15 November 2012, Akhilesh announced to a gathering of the state’sbureaucrats and ministers that he had been receiving threatening texts and calls in derogatory language. Akhilesh claimed



that the caller asked when he would get the laptops and tablets that the government had promised to distribute. The partyinsider said that this little speech was Akhilesh’s attempt at taking a dig at the bureaucracy, and thereby Anita Singh, overdelays with funds for the promised laptops, and the breakdown in their distribution.

As it happened, that gathering was an event meant to launch a women’s phone helpline. Following the chief minister’s speech,while the vote of thanks was proposed, Anita Singh called over the then-DIG, Navneet Sikera, and whispered something tohim. As the meeting was breaking up, Sikera stepped up to the mike and announced that no woman had spoken at the launchof their helpline, and so Anita Singh would do the honours. Against protocol, Anita Singh followed the chief minister, and spokeat length on the subject of making Uttar Pradesh safer for women. Akhilesh fidgeted in his seat and pretended to check hiscellphone. A police officer who attended the launch said, “It was an open display of a power game to establish who was theboss.”

Akhilesh and Anita Singh’s professional relationship began at a standoff, and worsened progressively. Several bureaucratsand Samajwadi Party politicians to whom I spoke told me stories of one blocking the other at crucial points in their decision-making processes. The young bureaucrat who is close to Akhilesh told me that Anita Singh repeatedly bypassed the chiefminister in decisions about administrative transfers and appointments. A senior police officer told me that ahead of theMuzaffarnagar violence, the ADG Arun Kumar reached out to her for clear instructions for the deployment of the ProvincialArmed Constabulary in the area, but received none in a timely fashion, because communications between the chief ministerand the principal secretary had broken down. When I interviewed Akhilesh, he refused to answer any questions aboutMuzaffarnagar. I sent several messages to Anita Singh’s office, asking for an interview, but received no response.

This alleged standoff constituted part of a costly set of mistakes. From March 2012 to September 2013, the first 18 months ofAkhilesh’s rule, 115 people had lost their lives and over 50,000 were reported displaced in incidents of communal rioting,according to official figures. For several months in 2013, director-general and assistant director-general posts in five of themost crucial state police branches lay vacant—these were the Police Recruitment and Promotion Board (UPPRPB),Intelligence Headquarters, Vigilance Establishment, Economic Offences Wing, and Security Headquarters. Four out of thesefive branches report directly to the chief minister. The principal secretary who laughed at the “5.5 chief ministers” joke allegedthat many senior police officials preferred not to work with Anita Singh, a relatively young officer—she is from the 1990 batchof the Indian Administrative Service—and were put off by the conflict between her and Akhilesh.

Law and order has been a particular bone of contention in Akhilesh’s regime. According to one Samajwadi Party veteran, inApril this year, Mulayam Singh secretly met Shivpal and Ram Gopal at his residence in 5, Vikramaditya Marg, Lucknow, inorder to plan the ouster of Lucknow district’s police chief, Yashasvi Yadav, an Indian Police Service officer from theMaharashtra cadre, known to be close to Akhilesh. The chief minister had manouvered to have Yashasvi appointed to the postin December 2014, appearing to ignore allegations of corruption against Yashasvi in the officer’s previous postings. At thispoint, Shivpal and Ram Gopal came together in support of Mulayam, in spite of their own differences: the goal was ostensiblyto take Akhilesh down a peg or two. After Yashasvi was transferred at the beginning of May, Lucknow went without a policechief for 45 days.

Still, father and son have forged a kind of political co-existence in which both survive by playing set roles—Mulayam Singh thedisappointed disciplinarian, and Akhilesh the chastened and obedient son. A former Samajwadi Party member revealed thedetails of a 2012 meeting in which Mulayam scolded Akhilesh openly for the dysfunction in the government. “It is a drill, a clearunderstanding between the son and the father for years,” the former member said. “Netaji scolds him publicly. The seniorsthink that Akhilesh is being scolded and revel in Netaji’s non-partisan leadership.” In a party full of chachas, it serves asreassurance. To old-time socialists who have been Mulayam’s fellow-travellers for decades, it provides a measure ofsatisfaction that their brash new leader can be held in check. “Akhilesh is happy with the obedient boy image,” the formerSamajwadi member continued. “It creates space for Akhilesh the baccha”—the child—“to survive.”

I MET NAVNEET SEHGAL, principal secretary of the information department, in his office in Lucknow in May this year. During ourmeeting, an official came in, sat across the table, and told Sehgal about a complaint registered against the seeds departmentby someone waiting for an overdue payment of Rs6 crore. Sehgal immediately made a call to a reporter. “Our seedsdepartment is doing great work,” he said over the phone. “Do a positive story on it. We will provide documents to you. Alsomention that someone is trying to extort Rs6 crore from us.”

Sehgal was a powerful bureaucrat in the Mayawati government, but transferred out following the regime change, to so-calledpunishment postings elsewhere in the secretariat. He was brought back to the chief minister’s office this year in order tochange perceptions about the Samajwadi government, which once again felt that it was suffering from an image managementproblem.

When I asked the chief minister about his administration’s focus on public relations, he said, “The government should hire asmany PR agencies as it needs for each of its schemes, so that there is awareness.”



The clamour for publicity contrasts directly with the danger in which journalists in Uttar Pradesh have found themselves. Thissummer, the grisly death of the freelance journalist Jagendra Singh made national headlines. Singh died of major burns afterhe was allegedly set on fire: in his last declarations, he placed the blame on a Samajwadi minister, Ram Murti Verma, againstwhom he had levelled accusations of wrongdoing in his stories. At the time this story went to press, it appeared that theAkhilesh Yadav government had given Jagendra Singh’s family some compensations, and was winding down the inquiry intothe matter. The government took no steps to suspend Verma for the length of the inquiry.

Three days before I met Akhilesh, several news outlets reported that the mother of a local journalist in Barabanki had beenburned alive outside a police station. I asked the chief minister if ignoring violence against journalists was a way for thegovernment to put pressure on its critics. “In the Barabanki case, the inquiry is still on,” he said. “But from what I know, somefamily members gave the woman diesel to immolate herself. It did not happen in the police station. If someone outside thestation instigates someone to do this, what can the police do? The police do pick up people to create pressure whileinterrogating, but not this. But since UP is a big state, a political state, there is so much media hype.”

In a state where social identity matters so deeply, police officers’ caste allegiances assume great significance in the daily workof law and order. The number of Yadavs in leadership roles in the state police is significantly out of proportion with itsdemographics—a bureaucrat in the Uttar Pradesh home department told me that 60 percent of the police stations in majorpolice districts are headed by Yadavs, but the community may beno more than a quarter of the total populationin the state.

When I asked Akhilesh about the entrenchment of caste allegiances in his state, he disclaimed the issue. “Caste is a problemin the north as well as the south. You have travelled so much. You know that discrimination is everywhere,” he said. “Butsocialists function without discrimination.”

When Akhilesh was first elected to parliament, his Samajwadi colleague in the lower house was his distant neighbour fromChambal, Phoolan Devi. He said he had no personal memory of Chambal’s caste wars. “I studied in a Christian school, andthen a military school, where there were no such divisions,” he said. Outsiders were always more scared by the thought ofdacoitry than those who lived with it, he said. “Those rivalries were because of land issues. You must have seen the movie,Paan Singh Tomar?”—the hit 2012 biopic of a National Games-winning runner compelled to turn dacoit when he returnedhome to the Chambal valley.

He paused for a moment. “But now I have made a lion safari there,” he said with a smile, referring to the project heinaugurated in 2012 in a forest close to the National Chambal Sanctuary. “Instead of dacoits, lions will roam around there. It isa big project, in 3,000 acres. Times have changed.”

I approached the question of the Muzaffarnagar violence from a different tack. Was it now true, I asked, that the partypractised strategic, opportunistic secularism, evident even in its approach to rival parties? The Samajwadis had made nomajor objections to thinly-veiled electoral speeches about “honour” and “defence” that the BJP leader Amit Shah had madeduring the 2014 campaign. Yet it blocked Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of the fast-growing All India Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen,from visiting violence-affected areas in western Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps the party feared that its Muslim supporters would shiftallegiance to the MIM, I suggested. “The local administration took a call on the issues of law and order regarding his visit,”Akhilesh said. “We don’t play any role in it.”

According to him, the state’s mixed population posed a problem to the BJP, which had played a deeply divisive political gameto make inroads here. “That is why BJP makes all incidents of disagreements into a communal issue,” he said. This answer didnot take into account the fact that riots and communal violence almost always occur because of failures or abdications ofresponsibility from state machinery. “The Muzaffarnagar conversation is over,” he said. “The state has helped in whatever wayit could.”

“IT IS NOT THAT THE CM'S OFFICE did not know that large-scale violence was brewing in West UP,” one of the chief minister’saides told me when we met in April this year. “It was the indecision.” One reason for this may have been the dissatisfaction thegovernment had incurred for a law and order decision it had taken just weeks prior to the mahapanchayat. In late August,1,698 activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad were arrested from across the state for flouting a state government ban on theiractivities. Those arrested included high-level VHP leaders, such as Ashok Singhal, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das and PraveenTogadia, who had managed to reach Ayodhya in spite of the ban. The incident had been messy for the government. “The CMoffice did not want a similar situation by banning the mahapanchayat,” said a bureaucrat attached to the office.

Figures of the toll of the Muzaffarnagar violence vary widely. Official documents state that the outcome was 60 deaths, sevenalleged rapes and 40,000 displaced people. In a public interest litigation filed by a victim of the violence, Mohammed Haroonand others in the Supreme Court, the number of deaths is pegged at over 200. The figures may well vary; bodies of those



killed in the violence were being found months after it was all over.

According to a union home ministry report released at the end of September 2013, 247 communal riots had taken place inUttar Pradesh already that year, compared to 118 in all of 2012. The BJP’s election plank consisted, in part, of sympathy forthe Jat community, whose members stood accused of rioting and were up for legal action. It was a strategy that brought theparty unprecedented success; it won 71 of the state’s 80 seats, a huge leap over its previous tally of 10. The Samajwadi Partywon only five seats, and the BSP none at all. For the first time in the history of independent India, Uttar Pradesh did not send asingle Muslim MP to the lower house.

A person who left the Samajwadi Party shortly after the Muzaffarnagar violence told me that the Yadav-Muslim alliance hadbegun to witness fissures. “Mulayam was known as Mullah Mulayam,” he said. “Akhilesh will be known as Yadav bhaiya.”

But in spite of widespread discontent over the increasing religious violence, Uttar Pradesh’s influential Muslim leaders may stillsee the party of Mulayam Singh as their best bet. Mohammed Shoaib, a lawyer who founded an organisation called the RihaiManch, to advocate for the release of those wrongfully accused in terror cases, told me a story that indicated how deep thoseconnections ran.

In May 2013, the 60-year-old Shoaib was staging a protest in his neighbourhood. He was agitating for the implementation ofthe Nimesh Commission recommendations. The Nimesh report, commissioned by Mayawati but submitted to the Akhilesh government, investigated accounts of police wrongdoing in the case of two young men accused of serial bombings inVaranasi, Faizabad and Lucknow, and arrested in 2007. In 2013, one of them was found dead in suspicious circumstances.The Nimesh Commission submitted its report to Akhilesh’s government, pointing out serious discrepancies in the police’s storyof the arrests, and accusing the state police of wrongdoing. Now, Shoaib’s protest was getting attention from the nationalmedia.

At his protest, Shoaib got a call from Maulana Fazlur Rehman Waizi, imam of Lucknow’s Teele Wali Masjid, a powerfulcommunity voice. Shoaib told me that the imam had called to arrange a meeting with him and Akhilesh. “They were trying veryhard that I get a photo clicked with Akhilesh so that I am obliged and co-opted,” he said. “They wanted to end the movement.”

“SP is no different from BJP,” Shoaib continued. “Both of them breed insecurity and pit communities against each other. Theyneed each other to polarise and survive. Like BJP panders to fundamentalist RSS, SP panders to influential Muslimfundamentalists without actually doing anything for the community.”

Back in his office, Akhilesh took an expansive view of communal harmony. He told me that his government’s laptop distributionand ambulance schemes were “the biggest socialist and secular schemes.” I asked him what he meant by socialism. “We havedistributed laptops to children from all castes and religions without discrimination,” he said. “The moment you have access tointernet, you create a platform for information. People who never thought they could have laptop now do. The centre recentlyinaugurated its Digital India scheme, gave a laptop to a woman. I saw the pictures and said, in UP, we have already distributed16 lakh laptops. There is not a single village in UP where Samajwadis have not given a laptop.”

He was a young chief minister clearly depending on technology to fast-track his plans for development, I said. What reasoncould he have for refusing to visit Noida, one of the most urbane, tech-friendly environments in his state?

“Noida mein kya hain?” (What is there in Noida?) he said. “Koi jaata hi nahin hain” (Nobody goes there at all). I pushed him alittle about the fear of the Noida jinx. “No, it is not that,” he said in English, and switched again to Hindi. “These things havebeen said for many years now, that the same government and chief minister do not return to power if they visit the place.Sometimes, we should pay heed to these things for our own good.” He repeated this for emphasis. “For our own good, weshould pay heed.”

An earlier version of this story referred at one point to Anita Singh as chief secretary; to Nakul Dubey as minister of educationduring a 2008 protest; and to Ram Murti Verma, the suspect in the Singh murder case, as minister of dairy development. Italso mistakenly referred to Kawal village as the site of a Jat mahapanchayat. The errors are regretted.

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist who writes on politics and social justice in South Asia.

Akhilesh Everybody’s Brother

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