A shehnai that once filled wedding halls, temples, and the ramparts of the Red Fort with sound — and a politician who says its master's legacy is now under threat. Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday, 7 November 2026 launched a sharp cultural broadside at the BJP, accusing it of hostility toward artists and promising to build a dedicated 'Shravan Sangrahalaya' (Listening Museum) to preserve the musical heritage of Bharat Ratna Bismillah Khan if the Samajwadi Party returns to power.

The charge: BJP as the enemy of creative India

Akhilesh's post opens with a stinging rhetorical cut — 'jinke liye shehnai nahin baji, unse aur kya umeed karna?' ('What else can you expect from those for whom the shehnai never played?') — framing the BJP and its ideological allies as constitutionally tone-deaf to art. He argues that conservative, orthodox forces have always feared creative people because artists, by their very nature, build the ground for social transformation. 'Positive art,' he writes, 'gives birth to empathy and tolerance — and that is precisely why they see every form of art as an obstacle to their agenda.'

The sharpest line is a direct equation: dismantling the composite legacy of a Bharat Ratna recipient is, he says, the same as dismantling the honour of India itself. The post ends with a blunt verdict — 'BJP nafrat ki aag mein jalkar desh ko nuqsan pahuncha rahi hai' ('The BJP, burning in the fire of hatred, is damaging the country') — before pivoting to the pledge.

Bismillah Khan: the Bharat Ratna whose shehnai defined a nation's soundtrack

Ustad Bismillah Khan, born in Bihar in 1916 and rooted for most of his life in Varanasi, is inseparable from the history of independent India. He played the shehnai at Red Fort on the midnight of 15 August 1947 as the tricolour was raised — a moment woven permanently into the country's founding memory. India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, was conferred on him in 2001, recognising a lifetime of elevating a folk instrument to the highest registers of Hindustani classical music.

Khan's legacy is also an emblem of Varanasi's syncretic culture — a Muslim maestro who performed at the Vishwanath temple, who saw no contradiction between devotion and his faith. For the Samajwadi Party, which has long positioned itself as the custodian of composite, pluralist traditions in Uttar Pradesh, invoking Bismillah Khan is both a cultural and an electoral argument.

The 'Shravan Sangrahalaya' pledge and what it signals

The concrete policy promise in the post — a 'Shravan Sangrahalaya', a museum centred on auditory and musical heritage — is specifically targeted at preserving Khan's body of recordings, instruments, and legacy in an institutional form. The SP leader frames it not as charity but as state duty: when you prefix a name with 'Bharat Ratna', he argues, the nation has made a covenant to protect that honour.

The promise follows a well-worn pattern in Indian state politics: opposition parties announce heritage projects tied to beloved minority cultural figures as proof of their inclusivity credentials ahead of elections. Whether Uttar Pradesh — where the BJP currently governs — has or has not moved to preserve Khan's legacy through formal institutions is a question the SP's attack is designed to keep alive in public discourse.

A culture war with deep electoral roots

The timing and framing of the post reveal a deliberate strategy. The SP's attack is not merely about one musician; it is about defining the BJP as an organisation hostile to India's pluralist artistic inheritance — and positioning the SP as its natural protector. Classical music, Sufi traditions, and syncretic folk forms have all featured in this ongoing cultural contest in Uttar Pradesh, a state where identity, heritage, and power are inextricably linked.

Akhilesh Yadav has increasingly used cultural and symbolic registers to broaden the SP's appeal beyond its traditional base. The shehnai — an instrument that plays at both weddings and funerals, in both temples and mosques — may be the most perfect metaphor he has found yet.

When a nation forgets the soundtrack of its own founding, it has not just lost music. It has lost memory itself.