When Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav fielded his daughter-in-law Dimple Yadav for the Firozabad Lok Sabha seat vacated by his son Akhilesh Yadav, the signal was clear: for the SP, this was no ordinary by-poll.

UP’s First Family was fighting to keep the seat it has marked out in this Etawah-Mainpuri-Etah ‘Yadav belt’ as its own. In its campaign in Firozabad, it paints a picture of the Family and Party fending off a rampaging enemy. “The Congress and BSP are conspiring to destroy the SP,” says Akhilesh.

But look closer, and the battlelines in this crucial by-poll are not as sharply etched as the SP makes them out to be — and this is not just because the SP supports the Congress-led UPA at the Centre. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that, in a sense in Firozabad, it is SP versus SP. Dimple Yadav’s main competitors are intimate enemies — former members of the SP who crossed over to the other side of the political fence not long ago. Both BSP candidate SP Singh Baghel and Congress’s Raj Babbar are better known in the region for their long association with ‘Netaji’s’ (Mulayam’s) party.

Camping in Firozabad in the run-up to the November 7 bypoll, supervising her husband’s campaign and starring in it too, Raj Babbar’s wife Nadira Zaheer Babbar acknowledges the SP connection and more: “It is true my husband was in the SP. It is also true that his reason for leaving the SP was never Mulayam, never the policies or ideology of the SP. My husband was a socialist since the time he was 16 years old. He was a follower of Lohia.”

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