Do Or Die Situation For Akhilesh Yadav

Battling first his father’s shadow and then the Yadav clan, Akhilesh is finally trying to become his own man in the run-up to the crucial 2017 assembly election in Uttar Pradesh

- Kunal Pradhan

There is no flagpole on the nose, and no red beacon above the cockpit, but there is still something oddly officious about the eight-seater Hawker 900XP jet parked on the tarmac at Lucknow’s Chaudhary Charan Singh international airport. It’s the middle of the afternoon, the sun is glinting off the white fuselage, and the tiny windows are tinted in a tantalising shade that reveal just a little bit of the plush interiors. Inside, Akhilesh Yadav, 42, chief minister of India’s most populous state, is ready to embark on yet another whirlwind excursion. He is heading to Saifai, the village his father Mulayam Singh Yadav grew up in, and which is now a swanky hamlet that serves as the unofficial seat of the state’s first family. For, though Akhilesh may be listed as the most important man in Uttar Pradesh in the guide books, he sits uneasy on the iron throne.

As the plane takes off, with Akhilesh in the middle of a deeply political conversation about next year’s assembly elections, discussing Mayawati and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and suggesting how they might join hands to topple him, his voice suddenly trails off midsentence as he glimpses something in the distance. He points at the barren expanse of mud and trees below, and in the middle of it, at a long motorway that is being built at double-quick speed from Lucknow to Agra, and onwards to Delhi via the Yamuna Expressway. “There it is, see it with your own eyes,” he says, “three hundred kilometres without a single break. That is what development looks like!”