Did Mulayam Singh Yadav's preaching drive Akhilesh Yadav to edge?

LUCKNOW: SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav first went public with his criticism of son and UP's first-time CM Akhilesh Yadav at the 103rd birth anniversary of socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia in March 2013. As Akhilesh listened, the SP chief advised his son to be “wary of sycophants“ and asked him to be a “strict administrator“. “Akhilesh, the government is not run by flexibility, but by taking tough decisions,“ Mulayam had said, adding that the government would have to face the “consequences“ if they didn't heed his advice.

If he was hurt or caught off-guard, Akhilesh didn't show it. Until now. Akhilesh had remained, in the three and a half years since that speech, loyal to and respectful of Mulayam, even as the party began to teeter on the brink of a split recently.

The four years in government have hardly been easy for Akhilesh. In the initial years, his ministerial colleagues and Mulayam's contemporaries rarely took the young CM seriously . For many months and until not very long ago, official government files travelled from the CM's office to MSY's drawing room before an official sanction was granted.

By the second year of the SP government, though, Akhilesh's own ideas of governance began to fall into place. The laptops his father's colleague had pooh-pooed came as the SP gov ernment's first big success in implementation and appeal.

Over the years, public criticism of his suspected landgrabbing ministers, sycophant workers, and indisciplined supporters continued, but Akhilesh fought back each time, saying the elders in the party had resisted the ideas that had now proved successful.

For a man on a mission to clean up the “goonda“ image of the party -Akhilesh resisted, successfully , D P Yadav's reentry in SP in 2012 -the merger with the Quami Ekta Dal, the party of gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari, and the reinduction of Amar Singh proved the proverbial last straw.

Finally , fighting to take control of SP's reins, this time, Akhilesh hit back. The rest, as they say, is history.