Lucknow, Aug. 3: Statues demolished, adversaries decimated.

With the Congress’s weight behind him, Mulayam Singh Yadav appears to have taken the fight to Mayavati’s statues before Mayavati herself. The Samajwadi Party chief last Wednesday warned he would unleash “50 to 60” bulldozers on a giant statue of the chief minister “when he came to power” if she didn’t pull it down now.

“If I tell my party workers, they can do anything anytime… but when I come to power, I will call 50-60 bulldozers and have them pulled down,” Mulayam said, singling out the BSP chief’s statue near Ambedkar Park in Gomtinagar here.

The bronze replica was put up next to Kanshi Ram’s on April 14, with the chief minister citing in her speech the BSP founder’s will that apparently declared her as his “true follower” whose “statues shall also be installed”.

One night in June, the statue was brought down and a bigger one put up in its place a week later. “The chief minister did not like the statue. That was replaced by a bigger figure,” an official had said. She was unhappy because her statue was smaller than Kanshi Ram’s.

Mulayam has more than one reason to be upset with his adversary but he appears to be particularly peeved that Mayavati has stalled the Jayprakash Narayan Institute of Social Sciences, a Rs 17-crore initiative that was initiated when he was in power.

Publicly, however, he has asserted that Mayavati’s metal replicas are against the country’s “traditional culture” that frowns on building statues of a living person.

In a swipe at the Mayavati regime, Mulayam said it was “doing nothing except carrying out a statue-building exercise”. “She is building a new history of statues.”

BSP leaders, reacting to Mulayam’s outburst, warned that Samajwadis would be dealt with strongly if they took law into their own hands and harmed the statues.

Observers, however, see Mulayam’s statue diatribe as a clash of political cultures between the Samajwadis and the BSP. The face-off mirrors the tussle in Tamil Nadu, where Dalit activists, including rationalist Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, put up their statues, said S. K Tripathi, an Agra-based expert in Dalit politics. The scramble was apparently triggered when a Periyar idol was put up within 100 metres of the famous Srirangam temple, he said.

Tripathi points to the apparent contradiction between the stand socialists like Mulayam are taking now and their own record. “The socialists misinterpret the value of statues in Dalit politics, although they themselves haven’t refrained from idolising (Ram Manohar) Lohia. They built expensive parks after him.”