The faction-ridden top leadership of the Samajwadi Party is divided again.
This time the issue is appointment of a new leader of Samajwadi Party in the Rajya Sabha after incumbent Ram Gopal Yadav was expelled from the party.
Party sources said while SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav favours Beni Prasad Verma as party's new leader in the upper house, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav is batting for Naresh Agarwal.
Though Reoti Raman Singh is senior-most SP representative in Rajya Sabha, his failing health made Mulayam go for Verma, a veteran who had left the party a decade ago following differences with the SP supremo.
Verma returned to the party fold earlier this year and was sent to the Rajya Sabha.
Akhilesh, the sources said, favours Agarwal as he has been a prominent speaker on behalf of the party in the upper house where he was seen as the number two after Ram Gopal Yadav.
Amar Singh, who was also sent to the Rajya Sabha by Mulayam recently, is not comfortable with Agarwal due to his proximity with Ram Gopal.
Agarwal had also favoured declaring Akhilesh as the chief ministerial candidate during the public feud in the Yadav clan.
He had been in Congress and Loktantrik Congress Party before he joined the SP.
With Winter session of Parliament beginning November 16, Yadav is likely to take a final call on the issue next week, the sources said.
The party has 19 members in the upper house and five in the Lok Sabha.
The last such meeting between father and son last week
had failed to end the impasse in the party which saw a vertical split as Akhilesh was anointed SP chief in place of Mulayam.
Amid a bitter tussle for control over the party, Mulayam had never projected Akhilesh as SP chief ministerial candidate and had rather asserted several times that only he will decide who will be the CM if SP came back to power in UP, where assembly elections will be held in seven phases from next month.
Party observers pointed out that the absence of Shivpal and Amar Singh at today's meeting was quite significant as their presence might have put off Akhilesh who is not on the same page with his uncle and the Rajya Sabha MP.
They said Mulayam perhaps wanted to settle the matter once and for all by not inviting them for the talks.
Akhilesh's rebellion against his father veers around a demand that Shivpal and Amar Singh be removed from decision making.
The Chief Minister accuses them of instigating Mulayam against him.
Mulayam, however, has so far not indicated that he could meet his son's demand on his two close aides.
Ramgopal Yadav, another uncle of Akhilesh, is on the side of the chief minister and is often accused by the Mulayam camp of misguiding the son.
Ramgopal has spearheaded Akhilesh's solo campaign, calling a party meeting on January 1 in which the Chief Minister was declared Samajwadi Party president in place of his father.
He also carried to the Election Commission six boxes of documents to prove that Akhilesh commands the loyalty of most party leaders and lawmakers and so is the real leader of the Samajwadi Party and must be permitted to retain the party's 'cycle' symbol to contest the UP elections.
But, in the process, he invited the wrath of Mulayam who demanded derecognition of Ramgopal as leader of SP in Rajya Sabha following his expulsion from the party.
Mulayam wrote to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari informing him about the expulsion of Ramgopal from the party and, in effect, as its leader in the Upper House.
He also urged Ansari to shift Ramgopal's seat to the back benches following his expulsion from the party.
