Mulayam Singh Yadav: The man who saved the UPA government

Mulayam Singh Yadav was the man who once ran the government in Uttar Pradesh. For most of the last five years, with 36 members of parliament (the number has gone down to 29 because some have defected to other parties) in the Lok Sabha, this man has been sitting and twiddling his thumbs. And then when he gritted his teeth and girded his loins to fight the 2009 Lok Sabha elections on his own, fate intervened in the form of the Indo-US nuclear deal.

After initially opposing the agreement, the Samajwadi Party (SP) changed its stand and decided not only to support the government, but also made extraordinary exertions to save it.

And this about-turn was not out of character. The SP’s record of standing with political formations it calls its friends is rather patchy. So when it switched sides from its loyal friends, the Left parties, to the Congress, the political world was not surprised. However, there is a logic to such behaviour—Uttar Pradesh has always dictated Yadav’s political choices and it was no different this time. His arch enemy, Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, had come to power in the state in 2007, and Yadav felt it necessary to prevent her from joining the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). So, swallowing his pride, he pre-empted that possibility by joining the UPA himself, a set of parties and people he had railed against bitterly.

A study of the SP’s history makes clear its basic philosophy which it has rallied around at different times: anti-Congressism, empowerment of the backward classes and secularism. Yadav’s leadership saw the party (under different names) pass through different phases: in its earlier phase, as a non-Congress, non-BJP third front coalition; then, in 1996, accepting the support of the Congress to install H D Deve Gowda as Prime Minister; in 1998–99 becoming a part of a Left secular alliance including the Congress but not accepting Sonia Gandhi’s leadership; and later still, dropping opposition to Sonia Gandhi’s leadership altogether and joining the UPA, which she chairs.

Mulayam Singh launched massive roadshows in the build-up to the elections, but it remains to be seen whether all the compromises have worked.

©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009; available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in

The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony