When the young Akhilesh Yadav became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2012, he came as a breath of fresh air. The air has now turned stale, pungent and acrid. He has proved to be worse than his immediate inglorious predecessors.
The situation is so bad that people are calling for his replacement with his father and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, the man who as Chief Minister institutionalised goonda raj in the State. They are even comparing him unfavourably with Mayawati who institutionalised corruption and self-aggrandisement. But he appears unfazed. Rather than take measures to correct his plunging image, Akhilesh Yadav is content to sink deeper into the abyss. He has combined failure in governance with a brazen disregard for propriety.
In retrospect, perhaps we had expected too much from him. He comes, after all, from the same stable that has produced the likes of Mohammed Azam Khan and Shivpal Singh Yadav, to name just two worthies. The decadent party that he belongs to has been created and nurtured by his father who used it as a vehicle to carve out vote-banks based on caste and communal divisions. Anything that came in the way, including the bureaucracy and the police, was crushed. Appointments were made not on merit but on caste and communal factors. Muscle-men were given protection and high positions because they furthered the dubious goals of the party and its leader. The people tolerated it for a while and then dealt a body blow to the Samajwadi Party. They entrusted the Bahujan Samaj Party and its leader Mayawati with the task of governing the State in 2007. She messed it up and a resurgent Samajwadi Party returned five years later, this time with a new face. A little over one year into office, it's time to write that face off, especially after the manner in which his regime has humiliated and hounded a young honest IAS officer, Durga Shakti Nagpal.
If you want to be charitable to Akhilesh Yadav even now, you can argue that his hands are tied. The mafia which controls sand mining and other illegal activities in the State and the party's leaders that set the communal agenda are beyond his control and owe strong allegiance to his father and party supremo. You can point to reports in a section of the media that Mulayam Singh Yadav, prompted by certain senior leaders, had directed the top brass in the bureaucracy to suspend Nagpal and that Akhilesh Yadav, who was caught unawares, had to subsequently own up responsibility for the act. If true, it speaks poorly of his leadership skills and grip on an administration that is supposed to report to him and not his father. Whether he acted at somebody's behest or on his own, the Chief Minister has created a disgraceful mess.
Akhilesh Yadav is an obedient follower of the Samajwadi Party's tested tactic of divide and rule. While communal disruptions work best, even a fabricated tale of religious disharmony can serve the purpose of keeping a particular community in good humour. Thus, a bunch of leaders of the party with the Chief Minister at the forefront, has been spreading the canard that the IAS officer's suspension was necessary to defuse a simmering communal tension in Kadalpur village in Gautam Buddh Nagar. There was no communal tension whatsoever in the village (both the area's District Magistrate and the local police have said so in their reports). And why should there have been when Nagpal had done nothing to promote such tensionIJ All she did was to point out to the villagers that an under-construction boundary wall housing a supposed mosque was being illegally put up and should be removed. The villagers themselves then demolished the wall — and the matter should have ended there.
Rabble-rousers in the Samajwadi Party would have none of it. They could not let go of an opportunity to arouse passions and cement their positions in the run-up to the lok Sabha election. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is worried that the Muslims may swing back to Mayawati in the coming general election, and the rest of his shrieking brigade comprising Azam Khan and smaller leaders like Bhukkal Nawab, Narinder Bhati and Naresh Agarwal, manufactured a situation of communal discord to frighten the minority community. Akhilesh Yadav sounded pathetic when he defended the decision to suspend the IAS officer. “We did the right thing”, he said with a plastic smile on his face.
No, you didn't, Mr Chief Minister. And it is unlikely that you will do anything right for the rest of the term that the people of Uttar Pradesh have to carry you like an unavoidable burden. Take stock of the situation and listen to your conscience, if you have one left, and you may want to go in for a course correction. But then I forget that you are promoting the Samajwadi Party legacy.
There have been dozens of major incidents of communal violence in the State since Akhilesh Yadav took charge, and in none of them has the Chief Minister really taken the administration to task, nor has he punished leaders of his party for their role in the violence. But he acts against an honest officer on the specious assessment (done by his communal-minded party leaders) that a flare-up might have happened due to the officer's action.
This brings us to his apologists, primary among them being Markandey Katju. Some months ago, the retired judge of the Supreme Court and Chairman of the Press Council of India was enraged that the media was questioning Akhilesh Yadav over rising instances of misgovernance in the State. ‘Give him time, it's too early to judge him', was his contention. Katju, who was vocal and all over television until recently, seeking pardon for film actor Sanjay Dutt, and who became a hero of the pseudo-secularists after he panned Narendra Modi, is today silent. He should support the IAS officer and condemn the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister. Surely he can recall some couplet of Mirza Ghalib or nuggets of wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita that will help him see the many wrongs that Akhilesh Yadav is steeped in.
In an article titled, “Son reinvents papa's party”, that I wrote for The Pioneer a little before the Samajwadi Party registered an impressive win in the Assembly election and Akhilesh Yadav became Chief Minister, I had hoped that the young man would strike at the nefarious interests entrenched in the party. I was wrong. He has tied up with those interests. But he has done his duty as a son. By playing to the communal gallery and by allowing all sorts of mafias to operate freely, he is preparing the ground to enable Mulayam Singh Yadav have a shot at the prime ministership. Even as a thought, the prospect is scary.