By all accounts, Mulayam Singh Yadav has squandered much of the gratitude and goodwill that came his way from a community that had felt besieged by the BJP’s aggressive mobilisation in the early ’90s, finally leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Memories of that time linger, of course, especially in the older generation, which still looks to the SP as the only recourse against Hindu majoritarianism. But the younger generation is increasingly reluctant to spare empathy for a party that has failed to provide the community with anything more than protection against the BJP. The saffron party itself has waned in UP. Moreover, the remembered fear of the BJP must contend with more recent images of lumpenism from the brash Mulayam regime that was ousted in 2007.

Perhaps Mulayam senses this disaffection. Perhaps that explains his pre-poll understanding with the chief minister under whose watch the Babri Masjid was demolished in UP. It may be that Mulayam calculates that the damage caused by his intimacies with Kalyan Singh to the SP’s already dwindling Muslim vote can be overtaken by the gains in the backward caste or Lodh vote that will presumably follow Kalyan Singh. At a time when the politics of “secularism” appears to have run up against its own lack of a development vision or moral imagination, the mantra of “backward caste unity” beckons once more to the embattled SP chief. His feverish clasping of hands with Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan is probably part of the rewritten script.

... contd.