In 30 Seconds
Story
The politics of Uttar Pradesh in the era this series now enters was dominated by a short, powerfully built man from an Etawah village who learned his craft in the wrestling pit and never entirely left it, the feints, the grips, and the sudden throws of the akhara translated across half a century of public life until the state’s commentators ran out of wrestling metaphors and simply called him Netaji, the leader. Mulayam Singh Yadav, three times chief minister, once the country’s defence minister, founder of the Samajwadi Party and patriarch of its ruling family, is the first current of the pivot decade made flesh, Mandal’s principal UP heir, and his biography, the pit, the party, and the contradictions, opens the batch that bears his house’s name.
He was born in November 1939 at Saifai in Etawah district, the batch’s eighth article visits the village his rise rebuilt, to a Yadav cultivating family of modest holding, and his twin schools were the akhara and the socialist movement, the young wrestler, local lore preserving the throw with which he won his patrons’ attention, drawn into Ram Manohar Lohia’s orbit in the anti Congress ferment this series’ churn batch described, the doctrine of backward caste assertion finding, in the teacher from Saifai, its most durable instrument. He entered the assembly from Jaswantnagar in the upheaval year of 1967, in his late twenties, and his ascent thereafter tracked every station of the era, the Emergency’s jails, the Janata ministries, Charan Singh’s Lok Dal succession struggles, until the wave of 1989 carried him to the chief ministership just as the pivot decade’s storms broke, the firing of 1990 and the epithet and the consolidation it earned him already entered in this series’ ledger.
His party and his peaks belong to the batch’s later articles, but the career’s outline stands here. He founded the Samajwadi Party in October 1992, a month before the demolition, rode the caste coalition of 1993 back to the chief ministership in the alliance with the BSP whose catastrophic end the batch’s fourth article records, served as defence minister in the United Front governments of 1996 to 1998, coming within a negotiation of the prime ministership in 1996, his own allies’ vetoes keeping the heartland’s strongest man from the country’s highest office, and returned to Lucknow for a third term from 2003 to 2007, before the succession, the feud, and the long twilight the batch narrates, his death in October 2022 closing six decades in public life, the republic conferring the Padma Vibhushan posthumously, and his funeral at Saifai drawing the entire spectrum his career had fought and courted.
The contradictions were the man, and the ledger states them without varnish. The defender of the mosque in 1990 was also the tactician whose party’s later accommodations with strongmen the crime batches document, the Lohiaite scourge of dynasty built north India’s most thorough political family, the champion of the backward poor amassed, with his house, the assets and estates the opposition catalogued at every election, and the secular icon supplied his own record’s worst passage, the remarks at a 2014 rally, reported nationally, in which, opposing the death penalty in a gang rape case, he said that boys make mistakes, words that drew condemnation across the spectrum, protests from women’s organisations, and a rebuke the record preserves alongside his defenders’ insistence on context, the series filing the episode as reported and the judgment with the reader.
What is beyond the contradictions is the achievement’s scale. Mulayam took Lohia’s proposition, that the plebeian majority should rule, and built the machine that made it, for long stretches, true, the Yadav peasantry’s arrival in the secretariats and thana verandas of the state his doing more than any single man’s, the Muslim electorate’s post 1990 shelter his construction, and the party he founded remains, as this series writes, the state’s principal opposition and the 2024 election’s largest UP winner under the son the batch will meet. The wrestler’s own summary of method, offered across a hundred interviews, was the akhara’s, that the opponent’s strength must be turned, never met head on, and his career, from the 1967 assembly to the 2019 farewell speech in which he wished his lifelong adversary’s prime ministership well to the house’s astonishment, practised it to the end. The party he built as the doctrine’s vehicle, and the family firm it became, is the next article’s file.
