Vetals of Vikramaditya Marg
It’s not just flesh and blood alone, but the heart which makes us fathers and sons. Thus spoke the redoubtable muscleman of UP politics, Mulayam Singh Yadav, in the throes of a family crisis, to a confidant. But why did Mulayam lose his heart? As messed up as King Lear in the Third Act of the Bard’s play, the aging satrap of Mandal politics is facing both an internal and external storm, having lost control over his divided but furiously intriguing family while slicing up his political fiefdom on the lines of allegiance and blood relations.
Mulayam met his moirai — the Greek ‘Fates’— attempting to undo his deed. In trying to restore order post-facto, Mulayam seems to have failed as miserably as the mythical king of Thebes. Only, like Creon or Lear, he’s not been struck by tragedy, but then he’s a king no more. In his loss and near-irrelevance, Mulayam appears almost tragiccomic.
Finding it hard to believe that son Akhilesh Yadav is coming out of his shadow to fully claim the power that was bestowed on him, Mulayam is at war with a mechanism of continuity he had himself devised five years ago.
A continuity in which his place seems to be in question. His sudden redundancy in his own playground is perhaps what Mulayam and those who derive power-by-proxy through him are hard put to digest. That too at a time when the party he founded has an absolute majority and the son he anointed as his successor is the ruler. As you drive down Lucknow, Mulayam is all but forgotten.
In the political rebranding of the Samajwadi Party-in the billboards and in posters of Lucknow and the rest of urban UP-the old founder is either missing or reduced to stamp-size, placed amongst a row of past Lohiaite stalwarts. No special mention or status. A newly released Samajwadi ad-film is a more telling example of the changed optics. As the cameras roll, you have a young chief minister whowithout having shed the unwritten dress-code of Indian politics-comes across as a suave, modern, middle-class man doing his job with a smile, as easy and smoothly as he glides into his dining table with his pretty wife (also a politician) hovering around, not in the background but still in a traditional role, two lovely children bouncing around in a swank ambience.
He spares time for them in between a meeting, even plays a round of cricket. Mulayam is visually absent, not there at all in the entire film! Even the portrait on the wall that stares down as CM Akhilesh attends to matters of the state is of Akhilesh. What the old man gets is a mere acknowledgement in the voiceover. (It seems both the filmmaker and the CM dithered about putting Mulayam on the wall as he was seen to be carrying a wrong message.) In effect, this is the first election the Samajwadi Party is about to contest with Mulayam having little or no proactive role.
Perhaps with good reason. Look at what Akhilesh is up against. Two formidable foes. A Prime Minister who has fashioned himself as the answer to all ills, almost a Mr Growth of India. And a strong regional opponent, BSP supremo Mayawati, with a flexible and viable Dalit-plus caste coalition and not-so-bad record of governance. Akhilesh can no longer afford to go to the polls posing as Mulayam Singh’s son, be that little boy peeping from behind his fathe r ’s larger-than-l i fe shadow. Even last time, when his father nominated him as the party’s campaign chief and mascot to attract voters beyond the SP pale, it was Akhilesh’s ideas that carried them through to a majority.
The modernity-hating, computer- bashing Samajwadi Party was promising to distribute laptops (Mulayam would later hold the tablets responsible for the party’s near-wipeout in the Lok Sabha polls. In his recent public admonition of his son, Mulayam told him to become “like Modi”.) Well, Mulayam seems to have missed Akhilesh’s catchline, which is development.
In this not-so-subtle paradigm shift in SP politics, his era of goonda raj, and muscle-power politics is over. The Yadav middle class too is keen to shed the past image of patronage to shadier elements in the social engineering game, nor do they want their party to remain tied to the apron-strings of small traders of Uttar Pradesh. It’s this writing on the wall that Mulayam and his bloodkin who practice politics the old way — with borrowed muscles and money through small deals — don’t wish to see.
The Lucknow of today has its own set of well-heeled power elite and post-modern gated communities, comfortable in Gucci loafers busily shopping at their Zara showrooms. They have little need for the Shivpals and Amar Singhs-the latter need power for their sustenance and survival, not the other way round. Akhilesh and his young wife Dimple connect with this crowd far more easily than patriarch Mulayam.
He has also come into his own by deftly copying and replicating not his father’s old patronage politics, but the endowment politics of Nitish Kumar, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee. This heady mix of new roads to Agra and Mainpuri and direct benefit transfers to Bundelkhand is what marks him out from father M and uncle S and cousin Y.
The only Mulayam-era chieftain who’s of some use to him is Azam Khan, and that’s the reason the young CM has made a deft move to keep the Muslim vote-catcher on his side. Where Akhilesh has failed is, in bringing up his father. Up to date. The creator of Jiggs would have been amused at this latter-day version. The voter of UP, alas, is more likely to be bemused.