Yadav vs Yadav: More cracks in Samajwadi Parivar

Lucknow: Senior SP leader Prof. Ram Gopal Yadav, on Thursday, further queered the pitch for the Samajwadi Parivar in Uttar Pradesh when he admitted that the party leadership had ‘erred’ in sacking chief minister Akhilesh Yadav from the post of state president.

Prof. Yadav said that it would have been better if Mr Akhilesh Yadav had been asked to resign from state president’s post. He said that he had been ‘ordered’ by the party president to issue a letter appointing Mr Shivpal Singh as state president and the order had to be complied without any questions.

The SP leader, while talking to reporters after his arrival in Lucknow on Thursday, also mounted a veiled but frontal attack on SP MP Amar Singh and said that there is an outsider who is out to destroy the party.

“This ‘Sahib’ concerned had always tried to damage the party. Workers are demanding action against the person who is damaging the party and something will need to be done on priority”, he said. “Mulayam Singh will have to take this matter seriously. Something needs to be done against these disruptive forces,” he said and added that such persons wanted to destabilise the Akhilesh’s government. On Tuesday, CM Akhilesh Yadav had also blamed an ‘outsider’ for creating problems. When asked to react to Mr Singh’s remark that he was a ‘Mulayamwadi’ and not a ‘Samajwadi’, the SP leader said, “How can anyone be a Mulayamwadi without being a Samajwadi?”

Yadavs try to play down outsider role
As the power game intensifies, knives are out in the “chacha-bhatija” camps.  Meanwhile, a move is afoot by the Akhilesh camp to “sack” party MP, Amar Singh, whose “invisible hands”  it believes, are “behind the raging family feud.”

Without directly naming Mr Amar Singh, the Chief Minister had earlier stated that “an outsider was disrupting the functioning of the government and that no such interference will be tolerated.”

Rallying behind Mr Amar Singh, Shivpal Yadav rejected the “outsider”  theory and said “everyone is needed to make the party stronger.” Some SP functionaries said that Amar  Singh “cannot be removed without clearance from Mulayam Singh Yadav. Akhilesh  cannot do it”.