LUCKNOW: Is political water really thicker than blood? The UP assembly elections have thrown up cases where differences in leanings within influential political families have come out widely in the open. So, while defection of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s younger daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav, his relatives – Hari Om Yadav and Pramod Gupta – to BJP hogged all the limelight, cases of brewing schism within other political families are also conspicuous in the current poll season.
The latest being the influential Shakya family in Auraiya. Here, Riya Shakya — daughter of rebel BJP MLA from Bidhuna Vinay Shakya, who switched over to SP — will contest as a BJP candidate from her father’s constituency. Riya’s inclination towards BJP had become apparent on January 11 when she released a video to show her “staunch support” to the party while claiming that her uncle Devesh Shakya forcibly took her ailing father to get him join SP.
