Raj Babbar not ‘lion’ on Samajwadi Party, toes ‘Mulayam line’

NEW DELHI: If Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar is seen as the most vocal opponent of an alliance with Samajwadi Party, the picture may be highly misleading.

Not only does the actor-turned-politician appear apologetic about having defeated chief minister Akhilesh Yadav’s wife in a 2009 Lok Sabha by-election, he now claims that he left his Ferozabad constituency in 2014 polls to avoid a clash with a Yadav family scion. The confessions in a TV interview, which contrast starkly with Babbar’s acerbic remarks on SP, have come amid talk of Congress allying with SP for 2017 assembly elections.

Babbar had earlier lambasted election strategist Prashant Kishor whose meeting with Mulayam Singh Yadav touched off the tie-up buzz. While Babbar’s anti-alliance remarks were seen as rooted in his bitter exit from SP in 2006, the interview video that is doing the rounds in the party circles has raised questions if Babbar was being double-faced.


In the said interview, Babbar says he has utmost respect for Mulayam Singh and denies he “betrayed” the SP chief by contesting and defeating Dimple Yadav in Ferozabad bypolls in 2009. “When I went to Ferozabad, there was nobody from the ‘family’ and an outsider was to contest (from SP). Then, after my name was announced on August 26, a kid (Dimple) from the family came to contest on September 4. I was helpless, I could not have withdrawn. I contested and won,” he clarified on the high-profile contest in the Yadav stronghold which became an embarrassment for Mulayam and son Akhilesh.

As if to buttress his goodwill for the Yadav household, Babbar said in the interview that in 2014 LS elections, he took the initiative to ask if anyone from the “family” would contest and was told that son of Ramgopal Yadav, Mulayam’s brother, would be fighting.

“I asked Ramgopal and he said ‘your nephew will contest’. I quit the seat I had won and went away,” Babbar said. In 2014, Babbar left Ferozabad for Ghaziabad. The former was won by Ramgopal’s son Akshay even as Babbar lost from his new constituency.

Sources close to the actorturned-MP told TOI that Babbar left Ferozabad to “undo the charge of betraying” Mulayam, and had informed the Congress brass about it.

A flummoxed pro-alliance Congress leader questioned Babbar’s earlier anti-Samajwadi posturing, adding, “Even at the peak of our hostility with SP, the UP Congress chief was negotiating with Mulayam’s family.”