The third of October, all blue skies and blazing sun, was the best day of his life, said 19-year-old Radhe Yadav. That morning, the teenage...
The third of October, all blue skies and blazing sun, was the best day of his life, said 19-year-old Radhe Yadav. That morning, the teenager, who lives on the outskirts of Etawah town, had been granted 30 seconds of virtual facetime with the man he claims he would give his life for: Samajwadi Party national president and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav.
The rendezvous, arranged by a family friend who is part of the former chief minister’s security detail, was brief, but Radhe Yadav made sure to take several screen grabs of it. They were all going to be posted on his Facebook page, otherwise replete with his selfies.
Radhe Yadav identifies as a Samajwadi Party worker, but it is Akhilesh Yadav whom he swears by. “I am a big fan of Akhilesh bhaiyya,” he said, using the reverential Hindi word for elder brother. “Kuch bhi kar sakte hai unke liye. I can do anything for him.”
Such unbridled enthusiasm among young workers ordinarily makes the seniors in a political party happy. But 59-year-old Wasim Chaudhury, who heads the Etawah city unit of the Samajwadi Party, could not stop complaining about the party’s youth cadres “expending all their energy on Facebook and...
