By Chiranjib Halder
Politics makes strange bedfellows and Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party patriarch and an astute politician stayed true to this adage throughout his chequered career. In his valedictory speech in parliament prior to the 2019 general elections, Mulayam Yadav alias Netaji gobsmacked the entire opposition by lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi and wishing him a second stint. It was a furore in parliament that stirred a hornet’s nest and stunned all and sundry. A flustered UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi did not know how to react; Akhilesh Yadav, son and successor to the Samajwadi Party supremo was bemused, his party cadres blaming Netaji’s failing health and selective amnesia for the gaffe.
Mulayam Singh Yadav was undoubtedly a stalwart among Indian leaders who metamorphosed the arid landscape of cow belt politics for ever. He was more of a pugilist and less of a wrestler in the complex matrix of regional satraps, one whose appropriate punches carved out a roadmap which led to successes and failures with equal finesse. A staunch Lohiaite steeped in socialist ideology, Mulayam hit the turf as a giant killer exhorting the marginalised to unite and create new caste equations. The Congress for its moribund, waning state and BJP’s valiant call for an India sans the grand old party post-2014: both owe a lot to the rise of Mulayam Singh Yadav, the arch strategist.
Though he donned the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister’s mantle thrice from the mandal kamandal kinship days but lady luck betrayed the SP supremo as his prime ministerial ambition was waylaid by the skulduggery of coalition politics. The spoilsports were two Yadav chiefs Lalu Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav who frenetically opposed Mulayam’s name for the top slot when he was tantalisingly close. Again, it was Mulayam Singh Yadav who tacitly prevented Sonia Gandhi from becoming Prime Minister citing her foreign credentials after the Vajpayee-led NDA government lost the trust vote in 1998. Thus despite his criticism of dynastic democracy, many bitter critics of Mulayam Yadav accuse him of anointing his son in an opportunistic move as successor.
The Samajwadi Party patriarch was also witness to a bitter family feud between his son Akhilesh and brother Shivpal which took its toll on the organisation. His entire political career proved repeatedly that there are no permanent friends and foes in politics. Like a chameleon, Mulayam Yadav often dived with unintended somersaults to nurture his party’s interests. He agonised electorally by wielding the cops on kar sevaks at the height of the Ram Janambhoomi movement and even earned a pejorative sobriquet ‘mullah Mulayam’. But being a secular votary to the core, he perched himself as a true saviour of the Constitution cobbled a symbiotic Muslim-Yadav combo that paid him rich electoral dividends. The undivided Uttar Pradesh assembly was a different ballgame with 425 seats in 1989 and the Congress was hit below the belt in India’s most crucial poll-bound state.
The noteworthy clean finish in Mulayam Yadav’s political wrestling came prior to the 1993 hustings. To take on the BJP which had blurred caste lines and united masses on majoritarian lines, the Samajwadi Party dealt a masterstroke. It was an assembly poll in which a classic lesson in social engineering played to the gallery. Orchestrated by Mulayam, the experiment pitted Yadavs, Muslims, Schduled Castes along community chasms in a unique mandate against the BJP’s upper caste positioning. The BJP had won a sizeable 177 seats but the SP’s cosiness with Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party duo ensured Mulayam’s return as Chief Minister. It was a restless alliance, an entente of two different social awakenings, led by leaders terribly suspicious of each other and keen on expanding their party base but one that worked.
One must evaluate Mulayam Singh Yadav’s political ascendency amid tumult in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. The Congress has never been able to return to power since he became Chief Minister in 1989 and the party’s nosedive in the heartland has more to do with the stature of Mulayam’s chieftainship. The rejuvenation of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and sharp communal polarisation post the Babri demolition are also offshoots of this ferment that was synonymous with the SP supremo’s rise and stronghold. While forming the Samajwadi Party in 1992, Mulayam Yadav had asserted that winning an election was ‘kharcha, charcha and parcha’ (expenditure, canvassing, campaigning). As a socialist, Mulayam had always championed the cause of Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and minorities, augmenting the vast political swathe vacated by Congress in the Hindi heartland. Through the ebb and tide of politics, Mulayam Yadav prioritised political expediency above everything else, a quality he has passed on with the mantle to Akhilesh Yadav.
(The writer is a commentator on politics and society.)