Lucknow: In the early 1990s, Samajwadi Party founder and the then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav was given the moniker ‘Mullah Mulayam’ over his decision to order police firing on kar sevaks in Ayodhya at the peak of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. In the years that followed Mulayam unabashedly went on to don the chequered scarf and dupalli topi at Iftar parties that he organised at party headquarters and his official residence as UP CM to consolidate his then newly formed party among Muslims.Cut to 2026. Mulayam’s son Akhilesh, who is now the SP chief, is set to pay his maiden visit the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple in Ayodhya on December 12, almost three years after the grand Pran Pratishtha (consecration) ceremony of the deity on January 22, 2024. Akhilesh has also initiated the construction of a huge Kedareshwar temple on a sprawling 50 bighas of land in Etawah around 20 kilometres from his native village Saifai.Earlier, he had got a 51-foot, 60-ton bronze and copper statue of Lord Krishna installed at Saifai. He frequently visits temples, attends bhandaras and advocates Sanatan practices. Along with this, the party indulges in extensive and meaningful Muslim outreach with Akhilesh attending dozens of Iftar events every Ramzan, donning his red cap where every precaution is taken to ensure that such engagements do not offer a handle to the political rivals to take on SP for “appeasement of Muslims”.On the face of it, Akhilesh’s strategy to flaunt his bent towards his own faith and at the same time reach out to Muslims aggressively may appear to be more of an election strategy that gains credence in every polls season. However, political experts describe the move as a well-crafted attempt to reflect Akhilesh as the “people’s” leader – a very backbone of the socialist ideology that SP rests on. Experts believe that over the years Akhilesh has done some well-balanced tight-rope-walks to shed the ‘appeasement’ labels that the party had acquired with founder Mulayam Singh at the helm – moves that may have been apt for their times but were not politically viable today.Party insiders say the need for a shift in strategy was underscored after BJP swept one election after another riding the Hindutva wave, starting from 2014 Lok Sabha polls. In 2017 assembly polls that followed, UP got its first saffron-clad chief minister in Yogi Adityanath.While reviewing the factors that went in favour of the BJP in 2017, the SP strategists decided that party leadership following the Hindu religion ardently needed more public mentions because the Yadavs were public figures, it was important for them to share with the people such spiritual moments of their religious side as well. The party made cautious efforts to ensure that Akhilesh’s engagements with Hindu religious affairs like performing Puja at home, attending religious rituals with his wife, were shared publicly.Initial attempts like Akhilesh’s decision to visit a temple to install a statue at a temple in Lucknow in September 2017, faced severe protests from right wing activists. But it did not deter SP chief from visits to Vindhyachal temple in Mirzapur, Ravidas temple in Varanasi’s Seer Goverdhanpur, camp in Chitrakoot where Lord Ram had spent 12 years of his 14-year-exile and staying at the Kamadgiri temple in the years that followed.At the same time, party strategists also made sure that the Yadav family’s religious indulgence remained separate from the party’s political affairs. Instead of religious events being held at party headquarters, Akhilesh went out to different communities himself to take part in their religious events. Apart from Hindu temples, Akhilesh visited Gurudwaras to attend Sikh events, Bengali Club during Durga Puja and Iftar parties during Ramzan.Initial fears of the party that any bold Hindu outreach may leave the Muslim community disenchanted from SP were proved wrong in bypolls on Kairana Lok Sabha seat and Nooorpur assembly seat in 2018. SP was contesting Noorpur and alliance partner RLD was in fray in Kairana. Akhilesh did not address a single rally in either of the constituencies still SP bagged Noorpur and RLD won Kairana – both have sizeable Muslim population.Akhilesh’s absence was deliberate about the premise that RLD will bag Jat votes which are the core constituency of the party. At the same time, the party was confident that Muslims would stand by SP too. With the Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress away from the contest, the calculation was no rocket science. The bypolls were SP’s first step towards shedding its image of being a party that heavily leaned on the support of Muslims after Yadavs.A year later, after the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) was passed in 2019 providing for fast-track processing to claims for Indian citizenship by undocumented non-Muslim and talks of nationwide 2019 NRC led to large scale protest across India, Akhilesh compared the Muslim women protesting at Shaheenbagh in Delhi to Jhansi ki Rani. In Lucknow Muslim women activists like Sumaiya Rana, who led the anti CAA and NRC protests, formally joined SP when the issue was still hot.The fact that Muslims did neither side with BSP or the AIMIM during the 2022 assembly polls or 2024 Lok Sabha elections and voted en masse for SP like never before, stood as an evidence of the fact that the community had become very much aware of how BJP would benefit if SP adopted a ‘visibly’ proactive approach towards Muslims.
