Why Stepping Into Wife Dimple’s Shoes Won’t be Easy for Akhilesh Yadav

Lucknow: Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has made his intentions clear that he would like to contest the 2019 election from Kannauj, which is currently held by his wife Dimple, but the contest would not be a cake walk for him like in the past.

The former UP chief minister had started his parliamentary career from Kannauj and has been a three-time MP from the seat. Although it is considered to be an SP bastion, if recent results at Kannauj are anything to go by, the party would have to work really hard to maintain its grip.

Dimple Yadav had won this parliamentary seat by a margin of just 19,000 votes in 2014, despite SP being in power in the state at the time. In the 2017 assembly election, the SP lost four out of the five seats and only won the Kannauj city seat, that too by a margin of just 2,400 votes.

To make matters worse, it lost all the three Nagar Palika chairman seats and all five Nagar Panchayat chairman seats to BJP in the recent civic polls.

On his tour to Chattisgarh, Akhilesh on the question of dynasty politics had announced that his wife Dimple would not contest elections. He confirmed later that his father and SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav will contest from Mainpuri instead of Aligarh, while he wants to contest from Kannauj.

Known world-wide for perfumeries, Kannauj has been an SP seat since 1998 when Pradeep Kumar Yadav became the MP here. A year later, Mulayam was chosen as the MP of Kannauj. In 2000, Akhilesh contested and won the seat. He completed three terms as MP and vacated it in 2012 to become the CM of Uttar Pradesh.

But if he has to win again, he would have to get the equations right. The votes of both Yadav and Muslim communities play a crucial role in deciding the winner. The share of Yadav and Muslim voters in Kannauj is 16 and 36 per cent respectively.

While they are traditionally considered to be SP supporters, Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party, too, are wooing them. The percentage of Brahmin voters is also around 15% in Kannauj while 10 percent voters belong to Rajput community, so they too cannot be ignored.