Opinion An enduring legacy: Mulayam Singh Yadav greatly contributed to the politics of empowerment of backward castes in UP

Mulayam Singh Yadav, who died on Monday at 82, embodied the transformative possibilities of democratic politics in a diverse country with raging inequalities. His political trajectory shaped and was shaped by the powerful currents of his time — Lohiaite anti-Congressism of the 1960s, JP-led resistance to the Emergency in the ’70s, Janata-National Front coalitions of the ’80s, Mandal and Masjid mobilisations of the ’90s, and the rise of the BJP. Trained as a wrestler, Yadav saw the political arena as an akhada or sand pit where strength, tactic and cunning produce the winner. Three-term chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Union defence minister, 10-time MLA and seven-time MP, he mostly won, becoming one of the most important figures of the non-Congress, non-BJP spectrum in the country.

Yadav did not have the advantage of family or the cushion of social capital when he started out as a follower of Ram Manohar Lohia’s Samyukta Socialist Party in the 1960s, winning his first assembly election in 1967. He soon carved out his own niche in UP’s crowded political space. The Samajwadi Party (SP) that he founded is today the main Opposition force in UP – in the last assembly election, it faced off directly with the BJP, with other constituents unable to hold up their ends of the multi-polar polity. It is in great measure Yadav’s achievement, too, that “social justice” is an integral part of the politics of all parties, influencing even Hindutva’s trajectory. Having worked his way through the peasant politics that roiled UP in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and led to the rise of middle castes, Yadav responded to the strong political currents in UP and in the nation in the 1990s, roiled by Mandal, Mandir and Market. The SP took a firm position against the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the Yadav government vowed to protect the Babri Masjid. The death of kar sevaks in October-November 1990 after security forces fired on a mob, however, polarised the electorate and the Muslim-Yadav alliance became the SP’s backbone for years to come. In 1993, after the Babri demolition, he stitched an alliance with arch rival BSP to prevent the BJP’s return to power but that experiment was short-lived. Within his party, Yadav saw himself as first among equals, and made space for prominent leaders like Janeshwar Mishra, Mohan Singh, Beni Prasad Varma, Azam Khan, Reoti Raman Singh.

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Even as Yadav had a sharp understanding of Mandal and Mandir, he was slow to recognise the aspirations unleashed by economic liberalisation in the 1990s. The SP’s anti-English, anti-IT politics till recently was a hangover of the agit-prop Lohiaite framework of the 1960s, interrupted by a phase when it swung to another extreme under the influence of Amar Singh. Like the other Mandal veteran, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, Yadav failed to institutionalise the gains of social justice politics and allowed the SP to shrink into a family fief. In his last few years, Yadav watched the party he built slip as the Modi-BJP confirmed its dominance of the Centre by winning one election after another in UP.