LUCKNOW: When

and

get onto the stage at Mainpuri on Friday to address a joint rally, it will be more than fiery speeches that will go out. They will send out a bigger message across the country — how two top leaders could put behind their decades-old enmity and caste conflicts to fight together towards a common goal.

It will be for the first time since the infamous Lucknow Guest House controversy that Mayawati will be asking for votes for Mulayam in his constituency.

At a time when Congress president Rahul Gandhi and AAP chief Arvind Kejariwal are locked in a Twitter war over forging an alliance for just seven seats in the national capital for the parliamentary elections, Maywati and SP president Akhilesh Yadav have sent a strong message across the nation in stitching a seamless alliance to take on their common rival BJP, despite a bitter 25-year-long history.

Those observing political developments in the state have witnessed how the two parties have sparred and turned inimical to each other and in the process empowered their support base of Dalits and OBCs respectively, also carving out space at political and social levels by elbowing out the two national parties—Congress and BJP for nearly three decades. SP and BSP came face-to-face for the first time when Samajwadi Party workers stormed the state guest house in the heart of Lucknow on June 2, 1995, reportedly to attack BSP MLAs while Mayawati herself locked herself up in room number two.

As soon as Mayawati became the chief minister in the same year with the support of the BJP, she retaliated by ordering a series of inquiries and cancelled licenses provided to industrialists in the earlier Mulayam Singh Yadav government.

In 2003, when Mulayam Singh Yadav became chief minister, he ordered the halting of construction of all memorials and parks in the name of Bhimrao Amebdkar, stalled funds for their maintenance and also snapped power supply, plunging Mayawati’s dream projects into darkness.

When, Mayawati bounced back to power in 2007 with a historic mandate, she rescinded all orders around her dream projects. Then, she turned the heat on Mulayam by cancelling nearly 22,000 recruitments in the state police, terming them as “most scandalous and contaminated.” She threatened to jail members of the Yadav family for their alleged involvement in what she termed questionable police selections, put half a dozen police officials behind bars and suspended nearly two dozen of them for their role in the recruitment process. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who was then SP president, has vowed during public rallies in Lucknow “to bulldoze all statues of Dalit icons and of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram in memorials and parks if his party was voted to power in the 2012 assembly elections.” SP was voted back to power in 2012 but chief minister and Mulayam’s son Akhilesh Yadav refused to take action against her or any former minister of her party despite having CAG, Lokayukta and vigilance reports against them.

Instead of bulldozing statues built by Mayawati, as declared by Mulayam, Akhilesh had a got a statue of Mayawati replaced with a new one within 24 hours of it being vandalized in Lucknow. This had helped save escalation of Dalit-OBC clashes in the state.

Years later, faced by the BJP onslaught, Mayawati joined hands with Akhilesh in 2018, defeating the saffron party in three crucial byelections in the state, including Gorakhpur, considered a citadel of UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.The alliance got cemented ahead of the

elections and both decided to forgo almost 50 per cent of their seats in UP to effect a strategic vote transfer and take on the BJP. It is learnt that it was Mayawati who floated the idea of joining the alliance rally in Mainpuri, where Mulayam is contesting. It was her decision to join and seek votes for Mulayam, her one-time foe, to send out a strong message of unity in the Opposition ranks in UP.