Mulayam’s move

For two parties so viscerally antagonistic, the Congress and the Samajwadi Party have an amazing history of collaboration. In 1996-98, there was the United Front government, with the SP as a constituent and with outside support in Parliament from the Congress. In 2004, the Congress-led UPA commanded enough support to rebuff the SP’s offer of assistance, but the offer was extended nonetheless. And, in Uttar Pradesh, the battleground where each of the two parties has seen the other’s presence as a threat to personal survival, the Congress was actually supporting the Mulayam Singh Yadav government till January 2007, that is, till just a few months before assembly elections were held. As with the support to the UPA, the Congress’s aid in UP was irrelevant — Mulayam had enough numbers anyway.

If this relationship appears to be laden with too many contradictions, the reason is easily found. Till now the Congress and SP have extended their support to each other less as a helping hand, and more as an indicator to show their voters what agenda they stand for. Now, however, as the air is thick with speculation about the SP bailing out the Congress in case of an outright withdrawal of support by the Left, the dynamic has changed. Since last summer, when Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party took a majority in the UP assembly and followed this up by taking on the Congress’s first family, the SP and Congress for the first time found common ground — a sense of threat from the same quarter.

On Thursday, Mulayam reflected the cusp his party is at when he chose to not mention the Congress by name at a meet to mark the anniversary of the Emergency. The Congress is working its way up a tough learning curve in dealing with regional partners. But doing business with the Congress will be equally challenging for the SP. They have so far sparred while denying their common interests. To prevent cynicism this time round — more in the context of a tie-up in UP than in that of a one-off vote in the Lok Sabha — they need to find themselves a positive platform for cooperation.