Akhilesh told me he will form new party: Shivpal Yadav counters CM

Mulayam Singh declared his trust for Amar Singh and said “I can’t leave Amar or Shivpal”.

Party observers said the meeting could have been at the behest of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had earlier in the day wished that Akhilesh and Shivpal transcended all differences and hugged each other at a key SP meeting at the party headquarters here this morning.

“I feel really sad because of this rift in our family”.

He added that Mr Singh has interrupted proceedings at several levels in the party and this needs to be stopped. You get some power and it goes to your head. Shivpal Yadav himself reportedly raised his voice: “Your Chief Minister is a liar”. He then said the party will not tolerate indiscipline. When an angry Akhilesh stripped Shivpal of his portfolios, the father took away the son’s state presidentship.

After the meeting, the Chief Minister recommended to Governor Ram Naik that Shivpal, Narad Rai and Om Prakash Singh (all Cabinet ministers) and Sayeda Shadab Fatima be sacked from his ministry.

He said that he had never severed his relations with Amar Singh and shared personal ties with him all through. “Abusing people does not help”. Until now, Akhilesh had remained, in the three and a half years since that speech, loyal to and respectful of Mulayam, even as the party began to teeter on the brink of a split recently.

He said people opposing the chief minister were corrupt and without character.

Akhilesh also wants to take the final decision on giving tickets, but his father is unwilling. “Look at PM Modi”. “Netaji you had become an alternate to Modi. He comes from a poor family, says he can’t leave his mother”.

And at the end of the day, Ram Gopal Yadav wrote another letter, this time in his capacity as a Rajya Sabha MP, in which he said he was pained not at being expelled from the party but at the charges levelled against him.

“I will stop those who conspire against me”.

The legislators who attended the Chief Minister’s meeting told the media that Akhilesh Yadav became emotional while talking about his relations with his father and said anyone coming between them would not be spared.

However, Shivpal maintained that Akhilesh had told him that he would form a new part, y and contest the upcoming polls.

On two occasions during the marathon meeting attended by Samajwadi Party leaders, Mulayam Singh, 76, shouted his son down, once asking him to shut up and later asking “tumari haisiyat hi kya hai?”

Meanwhile, the supporters of both Akhilesh and Shivpal gathered outside the party office in Lucknow and engaged in competitive sloganeering.