A former wrestler who drew on strength and guile in his short, stocky frame, Mulayam Singh Yadav found his way through the social and political matrix of India’s most populous state. In becoming one of India’s most enduring mass leaders in recent decades, he steered the power wheel of Lohiaite politics in the Hindi heartland, especially its post-Mandal strand.

A blend of OBC mobilisation and minority representation shaped his party’s political heft in Uttar Pradesh. But cronyism and a feud-infested family tree left a divided legacy. His last few years saw him being reduced to a languishing presence; the loss of hold over a party he sculpted made him a pale shadow of the force he once was of power equations in Lucknow and of rival claims in Delhi.

In some ways, Mulayam’s political journey mirrors the paths to power taken by a generation of young socialist leaders who were influenced by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia in the two decades following Independence, particularly in the Sixties. But, in other ways, they had his imprint – in action as well as inaction.

His first profession was teaching at an intercollege. His preferred training was that of a wrestler. But on the way, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s admiration for Lohia was serious enough to make him foray into public life. He was elected as a legislator in the UP assembly in 1967 on a ticket from Lohia’s Samyukta Socialist Party. Since then, his five-decade long political career was witness to not only the shifting sands of Indian politics but also his own evolution as a realist responding to different political situations and processes within the frame of the pursuit of power. In the process, he straddled the corridors of power in Lucknow and Delhi, becoming chief minister of UP three times (1989, 1993 and 2003) and India’s defence minister in the HD Deve Gowda-led United Front government in 1996. He even came within striking distance of getting the prime ministership in the era of coalition politics at the centre.

There is always a problem in tracing the running themes of Mulayam’s political trajectory – an ideological drive tempered by realist assessment, identity politics grounded in alliance-making, and national ambitions anchored by UP-specific calculations. It becomes even more difficult considering his long road to power, with stints in government and out. He sided with different formations like Charan Singh (Bharatiya Lok Dal) from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and different factions of the Janata Dal under VP Singh and Chandrashekhar in the late 1980s and ’90s. Even after he formed the Samajwadi Party in 1992, the fluid coalition politics at the centre, and the lack of decisive mandates in state polls in UP, left much space for his brand of pragmatism to be awake to many possibilities.

Amid this lack of clarity, however, one can still identify three threads in his approach to competitive politics: backward empowerment, anti-Congressism, and secular politics.

First, his key plank of backward empowerment drew on his idol Lohia’s saikre saath mobilisation as an instrument of social and political power. In Mulayam’s frame of governance, however, that was limited to empowering only a few OBC groups, primarily Yadavs. That, in turn, made the non-Yadav OBCs a big political constituency which the BJP wooed and significantly won in the last two decades.

Similarly, Mulayam also had to contend with the rise of Dalit political assertion which saw Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party emerging as a key challenger. The SP’s efforts to build bridges in 1993 and then 2019, under his son Akhilesh’s leadership, with the BSP proved short-lived. Moreover, the political alignment of a big category like OBC wasn’t as cohesive an entity as it was in the immediate post-Mandal years – something Mulayam realised late, but he couldn’t risk losing the stronghold.

Even if he hadn’t been a dogmatic Lohiaite, Mulayam did at times fall for some formulaic ways with an eye on popular reception. During his first stint as chief minister, for instance, he didn’t limit the anti-English movement to rhetoric alone. In 1990, he ordered the scrapping of the compulsory English paper in the state’s provincial civil services exam. He also made the use of Hindi mandatory in offices, courts and local establishments. Even if the Lohiaite push for mother tongues went well with a section of the electorate, aspirational groups in the state felt left out in the post-liberalisation economy that was opening more doors to those proficient in English. It was only in the first decade of this century that Mulayam made peace with the SP’s move to discard its anti-English stand; it mostly coincided with his son Akhilesh signalling a change of guard in the party leadership.

Similarly, without being a hardline Luddite, the party had been alarmist about computers. Under Mulayam’s watch, this stand was also revised to the extent that the distribution of free laptops figured as one of the party’s campaign promises.

Such adjustments could also be seen in revising his socialist positions on economy and industry. The privatisation of loss-making public units figured in even his first stint as chief minister, case in point being the setting up of the Uttar Pradesh Cement Corporation in 1991. In later stints, the drive to attract foreign investment (Uttar Pradesh Investment Centre) and industrialisation (Uttar Pradesh Development Council) became a part of his government’s outlook, even if close aides like Amar Singh brought with them the charge of champagne socialism and cronyism.

Second, Mulayam’s positioning as the custodian of secular politics went beyond his 1990 stint in which he had ordered fire on kar sevaks when the Ayodhya temple movement was at its peak. In the alignment of anti-BJP and anti-Congress politics, the counter to Hindu nationalism was meant to place the SP strongly in the secular space, with the incremental effect of adding minority support to its Yadav-centric OBC vote base. In the immediate aftermath of Mandal-Kamandal politics, it electorally helped the SP but the OBC was too big a group to be a cohesive vote base for long. The BSP’s rise and the BJP’s expansion shrunk these gains. That, however, cemented the SP’s hold over a significant part of UP’s Muslim voters.

Third, despite seeking and extending support to and allying with the Congress at different points, the Lohiaite streak of anti-Congressism defined Mulayam’s politics. His 2008 rescue of the Congress-led UPA government remained tied to his UP-specific calculation of preempting then chief minister Mayawati’s chance of getting a foot in the door of central rule. Almost a decade before, Mulayam had evoked “foreign origins” while turning down any suggestion of extending support to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s shot at the PM’s office following Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

But his three decades of anti-Congressism did mellow later, more so when his party slipped out of his control. This was a phase when his son Akhilesh allied with the Congress to fight the 2017 assembly poll. But a pragmatic Mulayam would have grasped the reasoning, as he would have again of the BSP-SP alliance in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll. The latter combine was once ruled out as an impossibility, especially recalling the 1995 guesthouse incident – an episode for which Mulayam never apologised.

Without losing way in whether or not these themes defined his political journey, it can be said that Mulayam Singh Yadav redefined the terms of political contest in India’s most populous, and perhaps politically most significant, state. In the process, he sometimes led and sometimes responded to essential political currents of his time as well as the immediate demands of pragmatism. Both affected the style and substance of his politics to different degrees. That, however, does not hide his languishing end as a party patriarch out of control of his party.