Badaun rape shows Akhilesh a bigger puppet than Manmohan

Given the average Indian politician’s penchant for corruption, inefficiency, callousness and ineffectiveness, one would think that the title of ‘‘most disastrous neta’ would have many contenders. There is Rahul Gandhi, who led the Congress party to its worst ever defeat (and with a smile, no less), any of the Left leaders who have made their parties entirely irrelevant, and of course former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, silent in the face of corruption and even in the face of his own achievements, unforgivably acquiescent to play second fiddle to Congress President Sonia Gandhi. And yet if one were to total up the various factors - like age, achievements and sheer ineptitude - the award would go hands down to Akhilesh Yadav, who makes even Manmohan Singh look benign. In fact, there are a number of uncanny similarities between the governing styles of Manmohan Singh and Akhilesh Yadav. Both in positions of considerable power, they did not wield it, preferring instead to be used as puppets for others. Both let the ball slip on important public issues, both held out great promise to deliver only to see public perception turn against them, and both have been left looking like nothing but hollow shells with no real political legacy. They are similar, except Akhilesh is worse as leader, and by far. Public safety and law and order The beleaguered Chief Minister once again found himself in the harsh glare of the media spotlight for all the wrong reasons. First  came the horrific lynching and gangrape of two Dalit teenagers in Badaun, followed quickly by the revelation that the mother of a rape survivor was beaten up and stripped by a rape accused’s father in broad daylight – right in his hometown, Etawah. [caption id=“attachment_1552525” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Who is really wearing the crown?[/caption] “Law and order is our priority and from today its our responsibility. Till now we have been levelling allegations on others”, Akhilesh told reporters after taking oath as UP CM. Almost two years later, these words read like a punchline of a really bad joke. Law and order has in fact, been the biggest casualty of Akhilesh’s government. The warning signs came early, at the announcement of the new cabinet in March which included the infamous Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya. The well-known thug accused in eight cases of attempt to murder, kidnapping and abduction was put in charge of the prisons department, no less, and awarded the lucrative food and civil supplies portfolio. This was surely a worse idea than making A Raja the minister of Telecom. Of the 403 MLAs elected to the UP assembly, a staggering 189 had declared criminal cases against them. But even in a state run by criminals, the SP’s own record is abysmally bad. Of the Samajwadi Party’s 224 MLA’s, 172 of them have serious criminal charges filed against them. ( read more here ) So no surprise then that within months of Akhilesh taking power,  the headlines were already warning of the return of the goonda raj to UP – and its women who became the inevitable victims. In 2013, the state registered 126 rape cases in one week alone. Worse, a number of the most prominent took place in his If Uttar Pradesh is the Rape capital of India, then Etawah appears to be Ground Zero. (You can read more about the horrors of Etawah here ) Similarly, Manmohan Singh presided over a steadily worsening situation in terms of women’s safety in his own backyard, which culminated in the brutal Delhi gangrape, and that finally saw public anger spill out on to the roads of the national capital. And Delhi has its own set of shameful statistics. The city recorded 1,330 cases of rape in 2013 as of 15 October, with a further 2,844 cases of molestation and 2,906 cases of kidnapping and abduction. ( Read more here ) If Manmohan Singh remained shamefully silent in the wake of the Delhi gang-rape, Akhilesh opted for brazen defiance. When asked about the Badaun tragedy, he responded, “You’re safe, right? You feel secure?” When exposed as woefully incompetent, at least Singh had the good grace to stay mum. The failure of great promise When he was elected asits youngest  Chief Minister, Uttar Pradesh and the rest of India had high hopes of a fresh faced Akhilesh Yadav. As pointed out in this Economic Times article , “With his friendly, accessible, boy-next-door, and educated (he did environment engineering from Australia) image, he represented a break from the image of “goondagardi” the SP had sported.” It was widely expected that he would herald a turnaround within the SP, heralding a new future for the party and effecting a new era of change within Uttar Pradesh. The reality as we have since seen, has been laughably different. Again, Manmohan Singh anyone? The former Prime Minister’s educational qualifications are well known. He attended Panjab University, Chandigarh, then in Hoshiarpur Punjab, studying Economics and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1952 and 1954, respectively, standing first throughout his academic career. He completed his Economics Tripos at University of Cambridge as he was a member of St John’s College in 1957. In 1960, he went to the University of Oxford for the D.Phil where he was a member of Nuffield College. But even more than that it was his image as a clean, good, honest and intelligent person that gave the people of India hope that he would be able to deliver, despite the fact that he was a known Gandhi family loyalist. He represented a refreshing departure from the seasoned politicians who often came into office carrying dubious political baggage from the past. Instead he left as perhaps one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers of India, matched only by Morarji Desai who was best known for presiding over the brief and disastrous Janata Party government in the 1970s. Singh represented the middle class ideal of a leader, as much as Akhilesh Yadav; the hope that a “clean” leader would deliver a very different kind of government. But of the two, it is Akhilesh who represents the greater betrayal of promise. At the very least Manmohan Singh’s disastrous tenure as Prime Minister will be offset by the fact that he is widely seen as the architect of India’s economic turnaround, and few can quibble with the achievements of UPA-1. But Akhilesh has no achievements he can point to, and his very first tenure already lies in shambles within two years of his election. Puppet politics Akhilesh Yadav’s bleak situation, be it the law and order situation or his party’s performance in the recent Lok Sabha elections, is entirely of his doing – or rather, the doing of his father, Mulayam Singh who is widely seen as the real power behind the throne. Much like Manmohan in UPA-2, Akhilesh is as a paper tiger, a squeaky clean facade that masks the return of politics as usual. As pointed out by senior journalist Neerja Chowdhury: It was Mulayam Singh’s writ that ran behind the scenes. It is hardly a secret that the top bureaucrats were appointed by Mulayam and reported to him. When things went wrong, Mulayam Singh publicly upbraided his son, not once but on several occasions. Things might have worked better had Mulayam Singh Yadav assumed the reins of power in 2012 and made Akhilesh Deputy CM. That would have been better, any day, than to have Akhilesh take over with “his hands and feet tied’.  Within months after Akhilesh had assumed power in UP, he was seen as a clean man with good intentions and  very little power. A man whose government runs to another’s dictates. And Mulayam Singh Yadav became Uttar Pradesh’s version of Sonia Gandhi, wielding much of the power without any accountability. And much like Sonia, Mulayam has been quick to distance himself from each of his son’s political debacles, pretending to express disappointment at his son’s failings. While his father’s loyalists run amok, Akhilesh’s role – much like Manmohan – has been primarily to play scapegoat, take the blame for Mulayam’s sins and with a meekness that even MMS would envy. But unlike the former PM, who at least stuck to principle on occasion – most famously on the nuclear deal – Akhilesh buckled on day one. When his cabinet was sworn in, it read like a Mulayam wishlist. And Netaji did not just cherrypick the cabinet, but also the top bureaucrats, senior police officers and the Lokayukta. Even Sonia did not wield that kind of clout in the UPA. The one advantage that Akhilesh enjoyed over Singh was his electoral appeal. He personally led his in the 2012 assembly elections, and can rightfully claim that many voted for him and not his father. But he has since lost whatever goodwill and respect he amassed during his campaign, and his government’s appalling handling of the Muzaffarnagar riots and their victims has broken the SP’s traditional voter base. He has shown a complete inability to protect minorities, assure public safety and take any kind of responsibility – even as he lost the traditional Yadav voter to the BJP.   Come the 2017 assembly elections, he may even make the Congress record of 44 seats look good.  And he won’t even have a Rahul to blame it on.