Chatterbox: Relooking at state leaders

Estranged Shivpal Yadav also said that his new party will contest all the seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections

“There is a limit to the humiliation a political leader can bear”. Thus spoke Shivpal Yadav, uncle of former UP Chief Minister Akhilesh and part of the larger Yadav family, who has just split the Samajwadi Party to form a Samajwadi Secular Morcha. 

The estranged Yadav also said that his new party will contest all the seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections — without specifying whether this would be all the 545 seats in the Lok Sabha or just the seats in UP. For the moment, the new party is concentrating on augmenting its strength in western and central UP where Shivpal and his associates are touring every week. Meanwhile, there is no response from Akhilesh.

Relooking at state leaders

The chances are that every second sitting MLA from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be axed in Chhattisgarh where elections are due in November. Almost the same pattern will be repeated in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In Chhattisgarh, Chief Minister Raman Singh has been given a free hand in deciding which MLA to renominate and which to drop. The idea is to fight back anti-incumbency. The BJP has been in power in Chhattisgarh for 15 years. 

This election is crucial for Singh personally as if he wins, he will be the only BJP CM to have held office for more than three complete terms. Singh first became CM in 2003. With former CM Ajit Jogi, leaving the Congress and forming his own party, the BJP state leadership feels that it will be able to do much better this time than in 2013. 

The gap between the Congress and the BJP in 2013 was extremely narrow — just 0.7 per cent.