The Wrestler Socialist
OBITUARY: MULAYAM SINGH YADAV (1939-2022)
Mulayam’s rise symbolised the irreversible ascent of OBCs in Uttar Pradesh’s politics
In the 1960s, the Congress was a political monolith and the opposition just an idea in a few heads separated by space, time and ideology. The stranglehold the socially and economically privileged had in Uttar Pradesh was such that cracking the ceiling was well nigh impossible, especially since history had not left the subaltern combatants with either the sophistication or the organisation for it.
For the Mulayams then growing up in Saifai, even an ordinary act like going to school meant breaking unimaginable barriers. But looking back at his life, Mulayam Singh, the Yadav patriarch, must have felt he had achieved a whole lot more than he set out to do. Wrestling taught him the importance of subjugating the opponent outright for a victory. He started out alone but soon mastered the art of alliances, inclusions, brutal exclusions and break-ups. His first guru, then Jaswantnagar MLA Nathu Singh, was the only one who “became his mentor”, taking him from the akhada to the political battlefield. After him, Mulayam picked or dropped his mentors according to the changing needs of his politics. Speed and a nose sharp enough to read the political winds were his trademark. Post-1989, V.P. Singh’s move to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations saw the BJP throw a kamandal counter through the Ram temple agitation. As the Mandal vs Mandir debate heated up, Mulayam cast a net for OBC votes. He was in luck, for the Congress had never gone fishing for this segment. Meanwhile, the onward march of the kamandalites was scaring the Muslims. By issuing firing orders in October and November of 1990, Mulayam, then the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, stopped the frenzied karsevaks from doing to the Babri mosque what they eventually did on December 6, 1992. With this, he also managed to forge secularism to samajwad or socialism. That was his counter to the BJP’s own OBC push, with Kalyan Singh blending Mandir and Mandal in his political persona. The two symbolised the irreversible ascent of OBCs in UP politics.
The saffron surge led Mulayam to expand the Mandal definition and go for more inclusions. In 1992, he formed the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the next year tied up with Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). As samajwad met the bahujan, the streets reverberated with the slogan, “Mile Mulayam-Kanshi Ram, hawa mein ud gaye jai shri Ram (Mulayam and Kanshi Ram are together, the mandir plank has been blown away).”
Mulayam defeated the BJP at the crest of the mandir movement. If in 1989 he had evicted the Congress from UP, 1993 was the start of the BJP’s 24-year exile in the state. The alliance with the BSP didn’t last, with the SP chief said to have crafted an attack on Mayawati. It led to a bitter rivalry between the SP and BSP but it kept the two national parties eclipsed in UP.
The SP chieftain went on to play dealmaker and saboteur on a number of occasions in state and national politics. He defied V.P. Singh (who later vetoed Mulayam’s chance to be PM), swallowed the CPI in UP, and scuppered Sonia Gandhi’s chances of becoming PM by refusing to support her—a nativist streak there, as with his Lohiaite support for Hindi. But in 2008, he also bailed out the short-on-numbers Manmohan Singh government, in the process abandoning his Left Front friends. Mulayam became the CM of UP thrice, but couldn’t complete a single term. As an administrator, he took regressive decisions, including nixing an anti-cheating law (in exams), pausing anti-dacoity operations—though his gift of a Lok Sabha ticket to Phoolan Devi is often read as emblematic of his emancipatory politics—and being infamously soft on rapists.
But there were limitations to the “daanv” (wrestling tackles) he could throw. Mulayam allowed the dilution of the Samajwad ideology, acquired a taste for being seen in the company of Bollywood and big business and took flak for hoarding political power in his family. In the process, his OBC politics developed cracks and a perception grew that “Mulayam raj” meant “Yadav raj”. The intra-OBC faultlines cracked. In retrospect, Mulayam’s biggest mistake was that he derailed the BJP but couldn’t erase Hindutva. In the late 2000s, the BJP activated the dormant but ticking Hindutva pulse, while tilling the nonYadav OBC fields. In 2013, it unleashed Narendra Modi, who exemplified both traits in a potent combination. The North, especially, was a fertile field for this. It also used the post-Muzaffarnagar riots polarisation to revive Hindutva of a different kind. Polarisation not on tangibles like a temple, but on issues like shamshan-kabristan. The castes, unhappy with Mulayam and Mayawati, plugged into their Hindu identity.
From then on, Mulayam’s Mandal has lost thrice to the BJP’s “kamandal dressed as mandal”. And that’s the legacy he leaves behind for son Akhilesh. But the failures don’t dwarf the fact that a boy from a marginalised caste with zero privileges straddled Indian politics in a 55-year-long career. He leaves behind legions of admirers, both among those who call him an astute strategist and those who deem him a rank opportunist.