How Akhilesh manoeuvred to be in the forefront

Since a little over the past month, one heard no news from Uttar Pradesh except about the Mulayam-Akhilesh feud. In the theatre of the UP Assembly election, the unprecedented family drama that unfolded almost on a day-to-day basis, hogging the primetime and the limelight, did one thing for sure: it made the other players mere spectators at a very crucial juncture. BJP, BSP and the Congress looked out of frame and virtually secondary.

This near blackout of the Opposition, that too just before the elections, was the first and the most formidable gain of the ruling regime.

Democracy today all over the world is about perceptions. It is more about the reel than the real. Success or failure in the election depends significantly on the visibility and the media time occupied, especially during the months immediately preceding the elections. 

The 2014 general elections, for instance, in this sense, was clearly a watershed moment in India's democratic history.

The BJP and its allies used the media to the hilt. Massive whirlwind campaign showcasing the firebrand oratory of BJP's prime-ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, coupled with some imaginative sloganeering and technology-based props courtesy social media, reached a crescendo by the time people went to cast their votes.

Others in the Opposition were simply drowned in the tsunami. Visibility, therefore, was the key factor.

The whole spectacle that emerged from Lucknow recently clearly gave Akhilesh that decisive lead in terms of visibility.

Secondly, and at a more substantive level, Akhilesh emerged from the entire episode as someone who was desperately trying to delink from the old and the decaying remnants of the past.

The Mulayam Singh Yadav (MSY)-Amar Singh-Shivpal combine came across as representing the obsolete and the decaying - everything that was rotten and corrupt in the SP.

Akhilesh has all that works in today's time. Most importantly, he is young. Old is not gold any more, it is rather a baggage; a liability. Akhilesh represents the youth, the laptop-generation. He is soft-spoken and - as an engineer by profession - cuts a clean, pro-development face; a significantly distant and contrasting visual from MSY's image of a rustic, wrestler from Saifai.

In other words, MSY resembled more of an old, dilapidated and shut-down textile factory of Kanpur, while Akhilesh seemed to represent the thriving Silicon Valley.

The spectacle that portrayed Akhilesh pitted against MSY, interestingly, was not seen from the traditional moral lens of a disobedient son challenging his father, who founded the party and fought against the odds to establish it as a powerful political formation in the caste-ridden Hindi heartland.

Samajwadi Party (SP) under Akhilesh Yadav looks more credible, secular and pro-development. Don't make the mistake of discounting the caste investment and embeddedness of various political parties.

UP's politics has caste as its under grid. But to see the caste equations as fixed or given will also be misleading.

There has been considerable fluidity in the old caste arrangement. As a result, in a multi-pronged close contest, all the political parties try and reach out to "others", beyond what is presumably their traditional vote bank. Mayawati's effort to reach out to other castes, even Brahmins, represents that trend.

It is on this count that Akhilesh has gained considerably out of this month-long media-mediated theatre in Lucknow. He emerged taller among his contemporaries - as the leader who did not mind taking on even his father, the mighty Mulayam, to purge the SP of the old and the decaying.

It is no coincidence that the talk of Akhilesh as PM material started doing the rounds immediately after the family feud was settled.

SP under Akhilesh has clearly extended its political base in the supposedly less casteist terrain of the middle class and the youth, beyond its traditional MY (Muslim and Yadav) turf.

In addition, the so-called family feud considerably undermined the anti-incumbency factor in favour of Akhilesh.

What stayed in public memory was the uncompromising and bold crusade of a son against his father and his cronies.

If some think all this was drama, it was no doubt a well-enacted one by the ruling family in UP.

In any case, what is democracy without some drama; drama adds colour and makes the whole electioneering process a little more exciting.

The higher the stakes, the more eventful the drama. If that requires hiring a Harvard Professor, so be it.

What looks most certain is what appears a sunset for Mulayam might well be son-rise for the SP.