BJP'S PADMA POLITICS

MULAYAM SINGH YADAV

- By Prashant Srivastava

If politics is the art of the possible, the supreme artist may well be the BJP. The ruling party at the Centre has brought Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav back to the centrestage, via a political googly, just four months after his death. It has decided to honour Mulayam, known as a trenchant critic of Hindutva, with the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award. A surprise move, to be sure, but the logic is impeccable: the BJP has obviously detonated its Padma bombshell with one eye on the OBC vote bank.

In the late 1980s, when the BJP started the Ayodhya campaign that would eventually power it to the dominant position it occupies now in the state, the one leader who stood in its way as a stubborn secular was Mulayam. So adversarial was his politics to its own that the BJP camp had conferred on him the moniker ‘Maulana Mulayam’— the SP patriarch was held up as the very embodiment of Muslim appeasement politics, the oldest bugbear for saffronites. Now, however, on the home stretch to the 2024 election, the BJP has spied advantage in softening its stand on Uttar Pradesh’s tallest OBC leader. Not only does it facilitate crossover support from the Yadavs, the largest OBC bloc in UP with at least 9 per cent of its population, it helps partly defang its most stout foe: the SP.