The theme of Vande Mataram returns next day at Shahbad, may be a hundred kilometres away, at Mulayam Singh’s even smaller rally. Gone is his earlier pro-Muslim thunder. The message is now more conciliatory, of a move to some space in the centre, even though the lack of conviction echoes in his voice through the half-hour speech. Muslims are every bit as patriotic as the rest, he says, and the BJP casts aspersions on them over issues like Vande Mataram. Then, surprise of surprises (and you’d hope the Congress top brass is hearing this), he says Muslims were always happy to sing Vande Mataram, particularly during the freedom movement. It is only after the Jana Sangh began to politicise it, and made it a litmus tests for Muslims’ national loyalties, that they started to avoid the song. That was out of irritation. The freebies Mulayam now announces — higher education, cancer treatment even in foreign hospitals if necessary, unemployment doles — are now common to all faiths and castes.

And if you thought his rather more nuanced “secular” appeal now is just a cynical counter to the BJP’s effort to package Hindu nationalism as old fashioned patriotism, you see change elsewhere. In every political meeting you need a speaker to keep the crowds engaged till the leader arrives. Usually he is the rhetorician, the rabble-rouser and you can expect to hear from him all the terrible things that his party may believe in or intend to do, but that the senior leaders won’t say, the kind of rubbish that keeps crowds interested, particularly in a summer election at the peak of the harvest season. And what do you hear from the gent in Mulayam’s Shahbad rally? That his leader has governed the state so marvelously, it has notched up its highest FDI score ever. And the best is yet to come, billions and trillions will come from Japan, Europe, America, who all want to invest in Mulayam Singh’s state. Sure enough, Mulayam repeats the same dreaded three-letter word, FDI, in his speech as well. And then, perhaps sighting a few bankers and India’s most hawk-eyed free-market economist in our midst, goes to great lengths to explain how wonderfully he has managed the fisc, and how he could do it all without increasing his deficit.

... contd.