An error to regret for long

Amidst the fast roller-coaster unfolding in the battered Samajwadi Party, I landed up with a stunning news that the party would dump former BJP leader Kalyan Singh on Friday evening. The plot was told with all details but I  sat on it to do the story for Sunday, a lean day generally. Though tipped off the boss about the development, it was decided to do it for Sunday. The decision is now to be regretted for a long time until I land up with something bigger, as on Saturday SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav peeled off the details in a media interaction in Lucknow. My heart had sunk the moment when I saw from a distance Mr Yadav on a TV channel, while shopping in the narrow bylanes of Lajpat Nagar.

The big lesson for a political journalist, which I learnt now with a pinch of salt, is never to sit on any story, when the party you are covering is on a roller-coaster drive, where a herd of frenzied media men is waiting for  any new development, that too in the days of excessive electronic media. It appears that now we are in days of latching on a story and dashing off to the boss to say "look, I have this and we can not delay it any further".

The lesson has now been taken well.

Now on Mulayam and Kalyan, one having lost his plot completely and the other in the winter of his career but still thinking that he can turn the tide with his minuscule Lodh vote base. The UP politics is all about castes. No Rahul Gandhis and L K Advanis can change this fact. You have to hammer out the right caste equation to be on the winning side, else you will be wallowing in the abyss like the BJP and Samajwadi Party. Nothing remains your fiefdom, as even Yadavs this time deserted Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Rahul Gandhi is sitting on a great UP plot to get the Congress an unassailable domination in the Indian politics. As the Congress men not so much in the limelight in UP say that people gather in large numbers to listen to Rahul Gandhi but they do not vote for the party, there is a big disconnect to find out and that is micro-managing the polls. Raj Babbar won from Firozabad, as people had teach a lesson to Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had put his faith among the land grabbers in the place. UP chief minister Mayawati is having everything politically right but she is at the peak of her career and there is no more peaks but only decline.

The Congress has to climb a mountain in the state though the party does not have too many good climbers. The BJP is battered but has everything to gain and has its cadre intact who has been shifting from one party to another, while the party is waiting to get medically fit to reckon on in the political warfare.

UP is set for an extraordinary political battle in the two years time and much more churning process will unfold. I wish I hold on to the pulse of UP politics and its main characters.