Lucknow:
Akhilesh Yadav wears the humility of a winner well. He has thanked Uttar Pradesh for voting for the Samajwadi Party across caste and community lines and giving it a stunning majority at 224 of the 403 seats. He has credited his father's experience and wisdom and the grit of party workers for the win he crafted. He has refused to publically revel in Rahul Gandhi's poor UP show, wishing him well for the future.
Yadav Junior, who attempted a successful image makeover for the SP, also underscores that he made promises to keep them. "UP accepted the manifesto we placed in their midst and we will implement this manifesto for the prosperity of the state," he said today, also assuring the state that "anyone meddling with law and order will not be spared."
(Election results 2012: Highlights of Akhilesh's speech) So when SP workers attacked journalists in Jhansi, this evening, Mr Yadav reportedly intervened and then speaking to NDTV, promised that "the culprits will be punished."
Father Mulayam Singh Yadav will be the next UP Chief Minister, not 39-year-old Akhilesh, and the son makes clear that he was never in line for the mantle despite scripting the lucid UP win. Akhilesh Yadav has won his father his fourth term as Chief Minister. SP MLAs, Mr Yadav said, would meet tomorrow to decide on the modalities of government formation.
Magnanimous in victory, he said Mayawati's expensive symbols of pride, her huge stone statues, can stay. "We may look at building a hospital in the space not used in the Lucknow memorial park," Mr Yadav said.
(Read) During a tour of the Bundelkhand region last year, Akhilesh had vowed that Mayawati's statues would be pulled down after UP polls. "In recent times, uprising in some countries against dictators saw their statues being pulled down...In 2012, the day Samajwadi Party government comes to power, there would be no sign of the grand statues of Mayawati," he had said.
Early on Tuesday, once it was clear that the SP would win UP, Akhilesh Yadav stepped out of his party's Lucknow office to be greeted by a sea of joyous supporters, song, dance and colour. As a supporter crowned him with a
pagdi, other shouted, "Akhilesh has shown there is no other youth leader."
Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party is a 2012 coinage. For as long as the party has existed, it has been Mulayam Singh Yadav's SP. That changed with the UP elections, when Yadav Jr, 38, took charge of the party's effort to wrest the state back from his father's bete noire Mayawati. With a majority in the bag, Akhilesh Yadav can allow himself a smile and say - mission accomplished.
The SP leader said yesterday that he believed in God, but not in religious rituals and so was not sending up fervent prayers for victory. He said he had faith in the party's gritty electoral fight to remove the BSP from power; personally that translated into a 10,000-km
yatra, 800 rallies in UP over the last six months and a systematic attempt at an image makeover for his Samajwadi Party, all of which have paid off.
As Akhilesh wrote the UP script, he had his task cut out. The party has for long had a lawless image, attacked as a "party of goons" by opponents and Akhilesh Yadav set about attempting to change that. He insisted on hand-picking candidates unmindful of whose feet he stepped on, famously keeping the likes of DP Yadav away. Through his campaign he talked law and order as his party's foremost agenda.
He had other challenges. Three years ago, before the 2009 General Elections, the SP had said it was against the use of English and the use of computers. By 2012, the SP manifesto was the first to promise laptops and tablets for students who completed school-leaving. The manifesto is forward looking with an accent of education. Among the many changes the younger Yadav is credited with, is bringing in more young, educated professionals into his party.
Mr Yadav has been high on visibility in these elections. The red Gandhi cap, white
kurta pyjama and black sleeveless jacket have been ubiquitous as Akhilesh dashed to every corner of the state.
Akhilesh Yadav wears his party's socialist roots on his sleeve. The son-of-the-soil image of the Samajwadi Party's UP president has been cultivated with care and he does not let it flag at this, his moment in the sun.
He cut his teeth in politics early. He schooled at the Sainik School in Dhaulpur, Rajasthan, and then acquired a degree in civil environment engineering from the Mysore University. He finished a Masters in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1998 and was contemplating taking up water pollution projects when his father drafted him into politics.
Electioneering meant leading youth of the party on a bicycle, his party's political symbol, on the dust-tracks of UP; he was 27 when he entered the Lok Sabha first, winning from Kannauj in 2000, when his father Mulayam Singh vacated the seat having won two - Mainpuri and Kannauj. Mr Yadav has been the Kannauj MP since.
In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections Akhilesh too contested two seats and won both. He kept Kannauj and gave up Ferozabad. Six months later, when wife Dimple contested by-elections from Ferozabad, she was soundly defeated by the Congress' Raj Babbar, a former Samajwadi Party man. The SP had thought this was a sitter; the Congress made it a prestige battle, with Rahul Gandhi leading a pantheon of leaders to campaign for Mr Babbar.
A vital lesson was learnt - there are no free lunches.