Shahid Siddiqui

New Delhi, July 27: The Samajwadi Party is set to expel Shahid Siddiqui, editor and publisher of Urdu weekly Nai Duniya, whose latest edition carried a cover interview with Narendra Modi.

The coverage has drawn a hostile response from Muslim leaders and opinion makers and the Urdu press at a time the party has been receiving jitters from its crucial minority vote bank.

Siddiqui’s act “is an extremely serious matter”, Samajwadi general secretary Ramgopal Yadav told The Telegraph. “I will speak to Netaji (Mulayam Singh Yadav) tomorrow after which the process of his expulsion will start.”

Although Siddiqui does not hold a party position, he often appears on TV chat shows as a spokesperson. “He is not an authorised spokesperson,” Ramgopal said.

The reaction to the interview, plugged on TV as the work of a “Samajwadi leader”, today forced the party to issue a gag order to its “self-styled” spokespersons.

Ramgopal said only Mulayam, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, state unit spokesperson Rajendra Chowdhury and Ramgopal himself were mandated to speak on the party’s behalf from now on.

He claimed Siddiqui was “probably” not even a bona fide party member. However, Siddiqui had rejoined the Samajwadis on January 9 this year at an event in Lucknow in the presence of Mulayam and Akhilesh. He was defecting from Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal.

Earlier, Siddiqui had had stints in the Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party.

The Samajwadis’ pro-Muslim credentials have recently come under strain. For instance, senior minister and party founder Azam Khan nearly threatened to quit the government after he was stripped of the responsibility of looking after the Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Ghaziabad districts in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections.

Khan has a large Muslim following in these western districts from where the Samajwadis registered wins in the last Assembly elections.

Akhilesh restored Khan’s mandate after Mulayam counselled him to “stop needling” Khan or risk losing Muslim votes in an important swathe of the state, sources said.

The ongoing communal violence in Bareilly too appears to have angered Muslims. To add to the Samajwadis’ woes, Muslim craftsmen from cities such as Moradabad and Varanasi are up in arms against erratic power supply, especially since Mulayam and Akhilesh had promised them uninterrupted electricity.

The “last straw”, party sources said, was Siddiqui’s Modi interview.

Anti-Modi activists in Gujarat are already alleging that the Samajwadis have a “covert understanding” with Modi to cut into the minority votes in the upcoming state elections to undermine the Congress.