Mulayam Cannot Do Without Shivpal, Even If It Means Alienating Akhilesh

Recently I had a conversation with someone I had gone to school with and whose father is a leftist academic of great renown with impeccable Jawaharlal Nehru University pedigree. As is his wont, he kept trying to explain how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was going to get routed in Uttar Pradesh because the Muslims wouldn’t vote for it in any case and even the Dalits, post the gaurakshak incidents, had decided that they would not have any truck with it in the future. He was also optimistic about the possibility of a Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance with the Congress, which could potentially defeat the BJP.

Indeed on paper, such an alliance would be as invincible as the Mahagathbandhan that routed the BJP in Bihar. Mulayam Singh Yadav himself was open to the idea and for some time last year, when the Janata Parivar was on the brink of a merger, he had even asked Lalu Prasad to intercede on his behalf with Mayawati, only to be rudely rebuffed by Behanji herself.

The question then is, why is the coalition, which is so formidable on paper, not working out?

While both Mayawati and Mulayam are formidable netas in their own right, and such a coalition would be wracked with ego-tussles, did Nitish and Lalu not put aside their differences and come together in Bihar?

However, at this moment, the SP seems to have some ego conflicts within the party. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s writ is being openly defied by his own uncle Shivpal Yadav - effectively the second most powerful minister in the State Cabinet.

The party patriarch Mulayam has weighed in favour of his brother rather than the son and as on date, most of Shivpal’s portfolios, that he had been stripped of by the Chief Minister, have been restored to him - except PWD. Furthermore, the uncle’s favourite bureaucrats and junior ministers have been restored to power. In this view of the matter, the other question that begs an answer is this. Do the squabbling Yadav clansmen not realise that the unseemly spectacle that they are creating shall surely have an extremely detrimental effect upon their electoral prospects, and if they do realise the obvious, why is it that they are squabbling in full public view in the first place?

The answers to both of these questions lie in the past.

The 1990s were an exceptionally turbulent decade in the history of Uttar Pradesh’s political firmament. The Congress party’s grand social coalition of Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims was coming apart at the speed of knots. The Brahmins and other forward castes like the Baniyas and Kayasthas had already broken ranks with the Congress over its tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds on the Ram temple issue. Unlike other parts of the country, the Brahmins alone comprised more than 10 per cent of the population in Uttar Pradesh and had the capability to influence an electoral result on their own numerical steam.

Secondly, the Muslim community felt that the Congress’s flirtation with Soft Hindutva in opening the gates of the Ramjanmabhoomi temple was a betrayal. Finally, the Dalits were being aggressively courted by Kanshiram, who planned a DS-4 coalition which was best explained by a pithy slogan coined by the revered ideologue in the 1980s - ‘Brahmin Thakur Baniya Chhod, baakee sab hain DS-4.’ On paper, this was a most formidable social coalition and guaranteed to trump all others.

But there were two hitches.

The first one was that even though the Congress had embarked upon the process of implosion, the BJP was developing a pretty formidable base of its own. While there is no denying that a plurality of its supporters were indeed from the so-called forward castes, it was the only party that commanded voter loyalty across caste lines. Indeed, the BJP formed the government in Uttar Pradesh, on its own steam in 1991, while the BSP remained a bit-part player on par with the Congress. The only difference was that while the Congress was clearly in terminal decline, the BSP’s fortunes were slowly beginning to turn the corner. We need to realise that those were pre-social media, 24-hour TV channel and pre-internet days and a party’s support base had to be painstakingly built up on the ground, especially in rural areas.

The SP on the other hand had not even been established at that time. Mulayam Singh Yadav was still a loyal bannerman to Chandrashekhar while all of this socio-political churning was taking place in the early 1990s. He earned his spurs as a doughty defender of Muslim interests when as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (this was when Chandrashekhar was Prime Minister of India), he opened fire on agitating karsewaks in 1990. The Janata Dal government led by him proved to be short-lived as the Congress withdrew support to it when they toppled Chandrashekhar’s government at the centre. The socialists of the Janata Parivar traced their ideological lineage to Ram Manohar Lohia and the Congress Socialist Party. Their support base traditionally came from the yeomen farmer communities, including Yadavs, Kurmis and even a significant section of the Rajputs. Mulayam himself commanded the support of the Yadav community in a narrowish belt stretching from Etawah to Kanpur and hence, was a significant player as far as the larger Janata Parivar’s strategy for Uttar Pradesh was concerned.

However, Mulayam had greater ambitions for himself. He knew that after what he had done to the karsewaks, his popularity among the Muslims would increase manifold. He also knew that the Janata Parivar itself was headed for disaster. Old-time socialists had on occasion referred to him as Rammanohar Lohia’s spiritual son, but when the ideological parivar was at a crossroad, he decided, prudently in hindsight, to ditch them in order to directly address parochial sentiments of caste and religious fundamentalism and extremism, seemingly garnished with dollops of plain old thuggery and hooliganism.

However, the problem with his party was that he lacked geographical reach. Chandrashekhar strode Poorvanchal’s political firmament like a colossus while Charan Singh and Ajit Singh remained popular leaders in the Jat-dominated belt of western Uttar Pradesh. The SP was founded and christened as such exactly two months and two days before the destruction of the disputed structure in Ayodhya. Kalyan Singh’s government was also dismissed shortly thereafter. Once elections were slated to be held in late 1993, it was clear to all observers that the BJP was clearly the party to beat, as it was riding a crest of pan-Hindu consolidation.

Two months before the polls, an alliance was thrashed out between Mulayam Singh and Kanshiram - according to some accounts - at the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi. The alliance looked like the only grouping that could possibly challenge the BJP at the hustings and indeed, once results were announced, the BJP was reduced to 173 (a fairly impressive performance) seats while the SP and BSP between themselves won a clear majority.

Having said that, their combined vote share exceeded that of the BJP just by a couple of percentage points. Mulayam Singh was sworn in as the Chief Minister for a fresh term and he promptly initiated parleys with disgruntled members of the BSP legislature party so that he could form a government without BSP’s support. Kanshiram, canny operator that he was, was not oblivious of Mulayam’s machinations either. He even started talking to the BJP soliciting the support of the party to have Mayawati installed as the chief minister.

The working of the government was not smooth either as the two power centres - the Chief Minister and Kanshiram - worked at cross purposes with each other. In Kanshiram’s view, the compromise with Mulayam was a stopgap arrangement and hardly a template to be utilised for the future. However, the drawback with him was that he was unable to campaign as actively as he would have liked because of indifferent health, which had led to him being hospitalised towards the end of May 1995. On the other hand, Mulayam was conscious of the fact that as somebody who had been chief minister more than once, his knowledge of the nuts and bolts of administration was much greater. He intended to use the full strength of the administrative machinery to cajole or bully dissident BSP leaders to support him directly. It was like watching a relatively quiet period of play in a test match between two quality sides when it is known that sooner rather than later, ‘something’s gotta give’.

2 June 1995 was a typical hot summer afternoon in Lucknow. However, a siesta was the last thing on the minds of Mayawati and close to hundred legislators who had congregated at the State Guest House to chalk out the course of action for the future. The meeting was a closed-door affair and we now know what transpired therein. There is a good possibility that Mayawati was trying to cut individual deals with the legislators in order to secure their loyalty. However, she had definitely not reckoned with what started to unfold at about 4pm.

A mob had gathered outside the gates of the guesthouse led, according to some accounts, by Shivpal Singh Yadav, Mulayam’s younger brother and someone who had acquired a well-deserved reputation for having thuggish propensities. The blatantly casteist slogans yelled by the mob would have surely frightened the living daylights out of a relatively callow Mayawati. Some prominent SP legislators were also said to be part of the mob and are said to have physically carried off dozens of BSP legislators to the state assembly, where they were told to sign on a piece of paper proclaiming their support for Mulayam Singh’s premiership.

This was the age before 24-hour TV crews; so we don’t know what happened next. Some accounts, including that of Ajoy Bose, Mayawati’s authorised biographer, tell us that Mayawati was rescued by a few committed officers of the Uttar Pradesh police who were transferred the next day by the administration that was still under Mulayam’s control. The BJP folklore suggests that a major part in the rescue was played by Brahmadutt Dwivedi, a BJP legislator from Farrukhabad who put his lathi wielding skills from the RSS shakha to good effect. At any rate, although Mayawati was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh next month with the support of all the other parties in the Uttar Pradesh legislature, excluding the SP, the aforementioned incident nullified the possibility of an SP-BSP alliance any time in the future.

One of the more prominent subplots in the Game of Thrones involves Stannis Baratheon - the less celebrated but equally valiant brother of the King Robert Baratheon chafing at being overlooked in the line of succession in favour of Joffrey Baratheon - the King’s legal heir. This happens in the books as well as the teleserial despite the fact that Stannis himself had been his brother’s most loyal general with some truly astounding military victories to his credit. Like Stannis, Shivpal has always been at his brother’s side, doing all the dirty work for him, including, allegedly, the one at the State Guest House, putting his reputation and political prospects on the line just so Mulayam Singh could propel himself to positions of power. It is understandable that he chafes at being number two to Akhilesh Yadav - his nephew who had till about 2000 not even exhibited any inclination to join politics. However, the fact that Akhilesh is seen as an outsider is what works in his favour. At the time of writing, with about four months to go for the election, the following points are clear:

—The ‘liberal’ dream of a Grand Alliance decimating the BJP like it did in 2015 in Bihar or in 1993 in Uttar Pradesh is beyond the realm of possibility.

—Akhilesh shall not be happy at being slighted and he is the only leader in the Samajwadi parivar who has some kind of acceptability outside the core voter base of Muslims and Yadavs. He is perhaps resigned to the fact that he is going to lose this time and hence, wants to make a big statement in the run up to the election.

—Mayawati’s best ever performance was in 2007 when it polled about 30 percent of the popular vote even as it won a simple majority of the total number of seats on offer. In 2014, she polled just about 20 percent of the vote. The biggest problem with her is that out of the three major players, her core vote base is the smallest, although most committed. The challenge before her is to get a significant section of the Muslims to join her bandwagon. Whether she is able to do it and whether she is able to deal with the voter polarisation that shall surely occur across caste lines thereafter is the big question.

—In a three-and-a-half cornered contest (Including the Congress), in order to win a majority, a party needs just about 30 per cent of the popular vote, and hence, the BJP is going to be in an advantageous position. If the BJP replicates its performance in Bihar 2015 (about 34 per cent) in Uttar Pradesh 2017, it shall win and win big. Given the positivity surrounding the surgical strikes, 30 per cent or so does not look like a particularly big ask. Remember that it polled close to 44 per cent of the total votes in 2014. In other words, even if it bleeds one third of the supporters that it had in UP, it shall still romp home.