Written by- Dr. Abhay Pandey
During the 2022 Assembly campaign, Jayant himself had said he was not a ‘chavanni’ that would flip. Before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the RLD left the SP alliance and joined the NDA. On 22 August, BSP chief Mayawati asked Akhilesh to apologise to the Jat community and to the family of Chaudhary Charan Singh. Instead he said that if the talk was of giving the RLD 30 seats, four times that — 120 seats — should be given, or it would be an insult to the community and to Charan Singh and Ajit Singh. Leaders such as Sangeet Som have said that those who were called a ‘chavanni’ will not spare even an ‘ikanni’ in 2027. In 2022, allied with the SP, the RLD won eight seats. In 2024, with the NDA, it won two Lok Sabha seats. Ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections Akhilesh is betting on the PDA coalition, but alienating Jat voters in the west leaves that coalition incomplete.
The row began with his remark, made without naming anyone, that alliance partners “turn up from who knows where” and that “we turned a ‘chavanni’ into a rupee, and they still walked away. RLD national general secretary Anil Dubey and minister Anil Kumar said it was not merely an insult to Jayant Chaudhary, but to the legacy of Chaudhary Ajit Singh and Chaudhary Charan Singh and to the farming community as a whole. BJP spokesman Rakesh Tripathi said that on one side Akhilesh was insulting Jayant, and on the other the state president was hurting the entire Jat community. Linked together, Akhilesh’s remark and Pal’s comment have already moved from “a leader’s taunt” to “an insult to a community.
The resentment against the Samajwadi Party and Akhilesh Yadav among Jats and in farmer politics in western Uttar Pradesh has deepened over the past fortnight. It is no longer just a war of words. It has spread among RLD workers, Jat organisations and across the western belt. For Akhilesh Yadav, the safest — and perhaps the only practical — course now is to apologise. The RLD and Jayant Chaudhary took it as a direct hit. The reason is obvious. Akhilesh’s jibe landed on that turn. Jayant wrote that if cheap words had to be used, they should have been used with his name; targeting the Jat community was arrogance, and such conduct leads to a fall. Then came the charge that SP state president Shyamlal Pal had made an indecent remark about the Jat community in a mobile video. In Moradabad, the All Uttar Pradesh Jat Mahasabha protested at the district magistrate’s office, submitted a memorandum and demanded a public apology. Akhilesh did not apologise. That retort has poured fuel on the fire in western UP. The RLD’s line is clear: nothing short of an apology will do. At workers’ meetings the demand to withdraw the remark is being repeated. Western UP politics does not run without the Jat–farmer equation. In Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Baghpat, Shamli and the Mathura–Vrindavan belt, the RLD’s roots and Jat pride are bound together. The memory of the farm agitation, Charan Singh’s legacy and local self-respect — offending all three at once could prove costly for the SP. That is why an apology no longer looks like weakness. It looks like a way to contain the damage. Without it, the controversy will keep spreading. The Jat Mahasabha, the RLD and rival parties will keep it alive as an election issue. Bowing to the anger in western UP is ceasing to be a choice for Akhilesh and becoming a necessity. For the insult to Jats and farmers, there will have to be an apology — and the longer it is delayed, the higher the price. (The author is a professor at Ramanujan College, University of Delhi, and writes on contemporary issues. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, editorial stance or position of Zee News, its management or its parent company.)
