The Magical Mercedes Tour: Is the Samajwadi Party now speaking the language of the BJP?

After the Samajwadi Party’s Vikas Rath Yatra took off on Thursday, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav may well have been singing, “Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes bus.” He could have thrown in a request for a colour TV and a night on the town while he was at it.

The chief minister’s “vikas rath”, a swish red Mercedes bus with state-of-the-art interiors, had broken down after barely a kilometre, and Akhilesh Yadav had to jump into an SUV to continue with the yatra. The bus was plastered with a massive poster of Akhilesh Yadav riding a cycle but not for him the humble cycle yatra this time.

The visual messaging of the Samajwadi Party’s campaign for the 2017 assembly elections, controlled firmly by the chief minister’s office and his youth wing, is more about aspiration and less about Lohia-style social justice. The makeover that began in 2012 seems complete.

The son has risen

Two videos tell the story of the party’s change in visual messaging and the growing primacy of Akhilesh Yadav over his father, Samajwadi supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, or Netaji. The Lok Sabha election campaign of 2014 gave us the song Mann se hai Mulayam (Par iraada loha hai), which roughly translates to “soft of heart but iron-willed”, set to the tune of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.

The video for the song stars Netaji, descending on an election rally in a helicopter and generally being convivial with voters. There are flashes of Akhilesh Yadav riding a cycle, then of father and son handing out laptops to the youth. Tech savvy and with it, yes, a far cry from the old Samajwadi Party, which flaunted its Hindi chauvinism and suspicion of technology. But still grounded in the traditional imagery of affable neta and devoted voter, laying claim to the Lohiaite virtue of working at the grassroot level, braving the heat and dust.

Last week, a new video was released on the chief minister’s official Twitter handle. Netaji is a conspicuous absence. As a grandiose instrumental score plays in the background, Akhilesh Yadav wafts through chrome and glass interiors, signing deals, holding meetings. At the end of the day, he goes back home to play cricket with his children, while wife Dimple Yadav dishes out the rotis. No voters in the frame here.

The image seems to be aspiring to the ideal corporate honcho, cutting deals but still making time for family in his busy schedule. This is Akhilesh Yadav the technocrat, the chief minister of boardrooms and bureaucrats. One is reminded of his engineering credentials and his foreign degree; no attempt to scrub off the lucre anymore to make it more Lohiaite-friendly. One is also reminded of observations made by local journalists, that the chief minister is surrounded by a phalanx of bureaucrats and remote from the party cadre.

In 2012, the party came to power promising free laptops, scholarships, debt waivers and clean governance; while the Samajwadi Party promised to reform its old “goonda raj” ways, it was also offering a change from then Chief Minister Mayawati’s government, which was riddled with corruption charges by the end of its tenure. In 2017, the pitch seems to be “job well done”.

In keeping with its new tech-savvy iteration, the party introduced the Samajwadi Akhilesh App last year, to keep voters up to date with the schemes and good works of the government. The party website now boasts of a separate section called “Kaam bolta hai (The work talks)”. Click on it and you are greeted with the folksy notes of the song “Kaam bolta hai” and the government’s pet projects show up. These include metros, highways, flyovers, electrification, IT cities and teacher recruitment.

Cities and villages in Uttar Pradesh now bear the proud slogan, “Puraane vaade huye pure, ab nayi iraade (Old promises have been kept, now new goals)”. The “acche din” that Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised when he came to power in 2014, the party seems to be saying, have already come to Uttar Pradesh under the Akhilesh Yadav government.

Speaking the BJP’s language?

Indeed, much of the Akhilesh Yadav campaign has appropriated words and imagery associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party, also making a determined bid for power in the state this year. It is perhaps no accident that the rath yatra this year bears the tag of “vikas (development)”, rather than the Lohiaite party’s traditional concern with social justice, and the chief minister speaks of himself as the state’s only hope of “pragati” (progress) and “unnati” (improvement or maybe, in this case, coming up in the world).

The politics of aspiration, wielded so effectively by the BJP before the Lok Sabha elections of 2014, has forced a rethink among Lohiaite parties as well. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar and his Janata Dal (United) spoke of “nyaay ke saath vikas (development along with justice)" during the assembly elections of 2005 and 2010. In 2015, however, it was “vikas” that took centre-stage in Nitish Kumar’s campaign as he fought off the BJP.

This time, the Samajwadi Party has also devoted itself to convincing voters that it can be the vehicle of “vikas”. It builds, of course, on the image of a party that already stands for social justice. Besides, Samajwadi victory will still depend on caste calculations working under the surface and political alliances negotiated by the party old guard. But while the campaign might take it from village to village, the images given primacy are those of urban development and technological oomph, reflecting the chief minister’s pet obsessions.

As Akhilesh Yadav hits the campaign trail this year, it appears that he will not be content to remain a leader of the Other Backward Classes, like his father. With his promises of development, largely drained of identity politics, he seems to be casting a wider net, appealing to a range of constituencies. Sab ka saath sab ka vikas, anyone?