Mulayam, with some reservations

NEW DELHI: A personal anecdote to help place Mulayam Singh Yadav, the man, his politics, the contradictions in those politics, and the landscape where he had to act these through. The scene is from one of those days in the 2000s when the Women’s Reservation Bill was in jeopardy.

Mulayam had been one of its most cussed opponents for years, and his hostility was undimmed. He and Lalu Yadav were standing as the last barriers even on this instance. A group of irate women parliamentarians and activists Shabana Azmi and Brinda Karat among them trooped up to the third floor of Parliament building, where the Samajwadi Party supremo’s office was situated.

They made their case agitatedly and demanded to know why he was opposing women’s reservation. He spoke in disarming, near-pleading tones. “Where I come from, if I go to an MLA’s house, I’m offered tea from behind a ghunghat. I have not even seen any of the wives of my MLAs, beyond their hands and bangles. If I say yes to women’s reservation, it will be suicidal for parties like mine! Where will we even get candidates?”

From there, Mulayam of course lived to see the day where he and his own daughter-in-law, Dimple Yadav, were members of the same Lok Sabha. But the irony of a man identified with reservation policies being against reservations for another disenfranchised section — that is only one of the ironies that frames the man.

(He partly resolved that later by seeking a quota within a quota.) A socialist who moved towards concentration of power would be another.

These are not exactly tangential entries in a long career, but as a Lohiaite, Mulayam’s core politics was liberatory. The Delhi media’s urban lens was always firmly in place when they prefaced any description of Mulayam by recalling his young days as a wrestler: it fitted their idea of an earthy politician, and also a scrappy one. For one who helped break caste hegemony in deeply feudal UP, and dared to challenge Mandir with Mandal, it was in the end an image trap whose pincer-grip he could never quite escape.