Thursday saw the political stock of Mulayam Singh Yadav soaring once again. One one hand while the wrestler-turned-politician got his son Akhilesh Yadav sworn in as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, on the other he had the Congress party wooing him like never before.
With Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee breathing fire on the hike in passenger fares in the rail budget presented by Union Railways Minister Dinesh Trivedi and the strength of the UPA II in the Lok Sabha appearing on the edge, Congress left nothing to imagination vis a vis its “wannabe relationship with the SP in the coming days.”
And the effort to woo the Samajwadi Party was evident in the fact that Congress party treasurer and Gandhi family loyalist Moti Lal Vora led a delegation of senior Congress leaders to the swearing in ceremony of Yadav junior. It was however the presence of Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal that made the political vulnerability of Congress in the Lok Sabha quite obvious.
“It is not every day that in middle of a parliament session the union parliamentary affairs minister skips the day’s affairs and flies off out of the union capital to partake in the swearing in ceremony of a government of a party its leadership was cursing till recently,” observed a close aide of Mulayam Singh.
That Mulayam Singh Yadav could emerge an axis to efforts to revive the Third Front was not lost on Congress leadership was also evident by the fact that UPA Chairperson and Congress president Sonia Gandhi sent a personal letter to Yadav informing that it was her ill health that she could not make it to Lucknow for this “momentous event”.
A senior Congress leader on condition of anonymity told IANS that “in the changed situation the party was favourably disposed towards the Yadav duo and looked for a quid pro quo too.”
“The calculation is simple,” pointed out a state Congress leader who added how the party leadership had realised that its hopes of a comeback in Uttar Pradesh had gone up in smoke with the poor faring in the recently concluded assembly elections and that time had come for a tacit or inclusive arrangement with the Samajwadi Party.
Insiders in the SP camp admit that “feelers had come to Neta ji” to join the UPA and that Congress has made it clear that it would “walk the extra mile and do whatever it takes” to “get the Yadav on board.”
When asked of rumours doing the rounds that the SP could join the UPA government, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav said that “all such decisions were left to Neta ji and he would be the best to answer such queries.”
Mulayam Singh Yadav on his part told IANS that he was till now in the “thick of UP political activity” and had “nothing else in mind.”
“Abhi to dekh hi rahe ho ye sab chal raha hai (hinting at the hectic and prolonged assembly campaigning and then government formation), thoda susta lein phir aur cheezon pe charcha hogi” (You are seeing I am so busy with UP all this while, let me take some time off, then we will discuss), Yadav told IANS.