Shahjahanpur just foreword to UP polls: Amar

Sankarshan Thakur

New Delhi, May 27: If the Congress is agonising whether or not to seek an alliance with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, it can breathe easy.

Amar Singh, SP leader and Mulayam’s face to the world, is only too eager to ease the Congress off the horns of dilemma. ‘‘An alliance with the Congress? The question does not arise. Am I a fool to turn certain victory into certain defeat?’’
Amar Singh has never been known for a bias to understate. But after the SP’s victory in Shahjahanpur, he believes there is little room to overstate his case. ‘‘Every way you look, Shahjahanpur was the most astounding and important result of the recent by-elections,’’ he says.

‘‘We checkmated the sympathy for Jitendra Prasada’s widow, neutralised Mayawati who had mischievously put up a Muslim candidate, reduced the ruling BJP to forfeiting its deposit and won it by doubling the previous victory margin.’’ (The BJP did not, in fact, forfeit its deposit though it was fourth in a field of four.)
But it’s not Shahjahanpur that widens the smile on Amar Singh’s face; it is the prospect of grabbing UP when it goes to the polls in a few months. ‘‘The writing is on the wall: We are coming to power. Shahjahanpur is just the foreword.’’

The Samajwadi leader swivels gleefully in the leatherback chair at his posh South Delhi office and then enunciates the Amar Singh Thesis: ‘‘The message of Shahjahanpur is the broad-basing of the Samajwadi Party. It is not merely a Yadav-Muslim party now. It is a major, multi-spectrum player with a huge, almost enviable caste base. That is why I am saying the writing is on the wall.’’

The SP, according to Singh, won Shahjahanpur not just by holding on to its core votebank but by grabbing crucial bits from rival votebanks. ‘‘The Yadav BJP candidate and the Muslim BSP candidate could not erode our base because both realised we enjoyed greatest winnability. ‘‘What really helped us is the vote of other backward communities such as Nishads, Lodhs, Vishwakarmas and Kaashyaps. The BJP committed a blunder by throwing out Kalyan Singh. Now Mulayam is the only backward leader with credibility and winnability. Even the Lodhs of Kalyan Singh are coming to us.’’

And while on the backwards, Amar Singh cannot resist launching a sidewinder at Beni Prasad Verma, once no. 2 to Mulayam in the party and still seen as a grassroots challenger to the high-flying Amar Singh. ‘‘Beni Verma is considered a great Kurmi leader, so why can’t he get the Kurmis to vote for SP? He has even let Rajnath Singh win in his Barabanki backyard (Haidergarh).’’

It helped in Shahjahanpur, of course, that the SP candidate, Ram Murti Verma, is a Lodh but to Amar Singh that alone was no good. ‘‘The same Verma lost badly in the 1999 election. So something made a difference this time.’’

Amar Singh, according to Amar Singh, was among the factors that made that crucial difference. ‘‘UP has a Rajput chief minister but I took away more Rajput votes this time and that gave us the edge. Rajnath Singh campaigned from the helicopter; I went door to door and fell at the feet of Rajput elders. That paid off.
‘‘We are not just a Yadav-Muslim party now. I have shown we can get the upper castes as well.’’ As if to underline that, Singh says the SP gave tickets to 23 Rajputs in the last UP Assembly polls and 18 won. ‘‘All 18 were campaigning with me day and night in Shahjahanpur. The result is for everyone to see.’’

Buoyed and bullish, Amar Singh isn’t even prepared to look at scepticism on the Shahjahanpur pattern repeating across UP. ‘‘The trend is there to see. People are tired of the BJP’s Ali Baba and Forty Thieves government. They changed the Ali Baba but the thieves prosper under the new one. In the 1999 Lok Sabha, we led in 140 Assembly segments. We are better off now, we are bound to win, no question about it.’’

And so no alliances, no Congress. ‘‘The Left is with us this time, but that is all. The Congress is more useful to me as a competitor. As in Shahjahanpur, the better the Congress does, the more it divides the BJP vote and the more that helps us.

‘‘I remember Arjun Singh calling us migratory birds. We shall see which birds nest in UP and which migrate.’’ Amar Singh is already quite busy hatching.