Even by the Samajwadi Party’s recent standards of personalised politics, the campaign for the Firozabad bypoll was remarkable. The seat had been vacated by Akhilesh Yadav, party chief Mulayam Singh’s son, after he won from two constituencies in the Lok Sabha elections. Akhilesh’s wife, Dimple Yadav, was then put up in the bye-election in a fray made up of former SP acolytes. That the party had made the contest a point of family prestige was evident from its leaders’ outrage that the Congress had actually fielded a candidate against the Yadav daughter-in-law — a reference to the SP decision not to contest in Amethi and Rai Bareli in the Lok Sabha elections. Nevertheless the Firozabad demographic was seen to render it a safe seat for the SP. So the fact that the Congress has wrested it by a huge margin (more than 85,000) is bound to be perceived as setback for the SP for more than its symbolism. That impression is reinforced by the BSP’s impressive takeaway in the Uttar Pradesh assembly bypolls by encroaching into SP strongholds like Etawah.

The results encapsulate the peculiar dilemma of the SP. Given the state’s political fragmentation, candidates construct social coalitions by being seeing to be in contention. With the Congress making significant inroads since the Lok Sabha elections this summer with its go-it-alone strategy and with the BSP holding its own, the SP is being relegated to an also-ran. In UP that’s the way to irrelevance. The SP’s peculiar anxiety about being pinched out by the emerging BSP-Congress binary was seen soon after the Lok Sabha results when at a party meet Mulayam struggled to define its relation to the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre.

... contd.