Uttar Pradesh : Big blow to SP! Cancellation of Azam Khan’s assembly membership will increase Akhilesh Yadav’s challenge?
The cancellation of the assembly membership of firebrand leader and Rampur MLA Mohammad Azam Khan is considered a major setback for the Samajwadi Party. For SP President Akhilesh Yadav, who recently lost SP founder and father Mulayam Singh Yadav, the challenge may increase further due to the absence of Azam Khan in the assembly. Azam Khan, one of the founding members of SP, is known as the Muslim face of the party. First with Mulayam Singh Yadav and then with Akhilesh Yadav, he saw all the ups and downs of the party. His advice was considered indispensable in the major decisions of the party. He was even a partner in the decision to crown Akhilesh as Chief Minister when the SP got a majority in the 2012 assembly elections.
Azam Khan’s long political experience, a tenth-time MLA and a member of both the Houses of Parliament, matters to the SP. Azam, who played the role of Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Assembly to Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, was also considered a strong pillar of the main opposition party in the eighteenth Legislative Assembly. With his arguments, arguments and sarcasm, he had the ability to pierce the armor of the ruling party in the House. It is another matter that during the last seven months of the Eighteenth Legislative Assembly, Azam did not sit in the House even for a single day. Before the Governor’s address on the first day of the budget session in May, he along with his MLA son Abdullah Azam took the oath of membership of the Legislative Assembly in the chamber of Speaker Satish Mahana, but did not participate in the proceedings yet. Azam is known as much for the poisoned arrows that came out of his tongue, as much because of his quirkiness.
Azam’s tremendous influence in the SP government can be gauged from the fact that in the year 2013, after sensing Azam’s mood after being stopped for questioning himself at Boston airport in the US, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav turned himself in to Harvard University. He had boycotted the lecture to be given on the successful organization of Prayagraj Kumbh. Azam’s tussle with the SP lasted even when Mulayam was the head of the party and even when Akhilesh became the chief minister. During his stay in jail, the news of his bitterness with Akhilesh also made headlines, but his close people had the upper hand in the distribution of SP tickets for the Rajya Sabha elections.
