How Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav overcame differences before their UP alliance

India वोट Kar | January 14, 2019

Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav overcome differences with taking On each other’s adversaries

Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav, once bitter rivals, worked through a crisis that threatened their partnership soon after the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha by-elections in March last year. They kept their distance from each other’s opponents and from the Congress, and decided months in advance to take on the BJP together in the 2019 general election. On Saturday they announced that their parties would contest 38 seats each in Uttar Pradesh.

The early rift

After the Samajwadi Party won Gorakhpur and Phulpur with the support of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, Yadav visited her Mall Avenue home for the first time to thank her. People familiar with the matter said the goodwill soon faded. The partnership was shaken when the BSP’s Rajya Sabha candidate, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, lost while the SP’s Jaya Bachchan won. Mayawati was reportedly upset because independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh, a former minister in the SP government and her long-time foe, had voted for the BJP.

Making amends

Yadav moved quickly to distance himself from Singh and deleted a tweet in which he had thanked him. A senior SP leader said Yadav realised he had been misled and had let Mayawati down. Seeing the risk to the partnership, Yadav chose not to seek re-election to the UP Legislative Council in April and instead helped get Ambedkar elected to that seat. On Saturday, Mayawati repaid the gesture by attacking Shivpal Singh Yadav, seen by the SP chief as a rival.

Timing of the announcement

A party leader said the two had been in contact since an in-principle decision on an alliance around September, but held back the announcement to leave the BJP little time to prepare. An SP leader said the CBI action that followed their January 4 meeting in Delhi strengthened their fear that the BJP wanted to derail the alliance, so they announced it about three days before the expected date of Mayawati’s birthday on January 15.