NEW DELHI: Mulayam Singh Yadav never forgot the lessons he had learnt at the ‘akhara’: wait for the right moment, and in one deft move, throw the opponent off his feet. This was the famous ‘charkha daav’ and it came in handy in politics.
But Mulayam’s move from the akhara to politics was quite by chance. It was 1962 and the campaigning for the UP assembly elections had just started in earnest. Mulayam was in a wrestling match at Nagla village in Etawah when Nathu Singh, the Samyukta Socialist Party candidate from Jaswantnagar, turned up to watch the bout. Young Mulayam managed to bring down the local pehelwan within minutes with his ‘charkha daav’.

Nathu Singh praised the young wrestler, and Mulayam went out campaigning for him. The same year (1962), Mulayam won Etawah’s KK Mahavidyalaya Student Union polls by a record margin. In 1963, he completed his BTC (Basic Training Certificate – which made him eligible to teach) from AK College in Shikohabad and was appointed a teacher at Jain Inter College at Karhal – he had also been a student there from classes 6 to 12.
In the meantime, Mulayam’s association with the Samyukta Socialist Party got stronger. In 1967, Nathu Singh proposed his name as the Samyukta candidate from Jaswantnagar assembly seat. Mulayam found himself pitted against the politically well-established Lakhan Singh Yadav. But he won and never looked back after this victory. He was elected to the UP assembly 10 times and was sworn in as UP CM thrice.

But his long political journey was marked by many switchovers. From Samyukta, he hopped to Bharatiya Kisan Dal in 1974. Three years later, in 1977, he won on a ticket from Charan Singh’s Lok Dal. Then in 1989, he switched to VP Singh’s Janata Dal, only to join Chandra Shekhar’s Janata Party in 1991. But just a year later, he floated his own outfit, the Samajwadi Party.
In 1989, Mulayam became chief minister for the first time. He was with the Janata Dal at the time. But VP Singh, then the Prime Minister, was pushing for Ajit Singh as chief minister with Mulayam as his deputy. Janata Dal won 208 seats and fell five short of a majority in a House of 425. It was then that Mulayam staked claim to form the government with BJP’s support. Voting took place among Janata Dal MLAs, and Mulayam won by five votes, dashing Ajit Singh’s chances.

A year later, in 1990, when the VP Singh-led Janata Dal government fell at the Centre after BJP chief LK Advani’s arrest, Mulayam sought support from Congress chief Rajiv Gandhi and UP Congress’s senior leader ND Tiwari to save his government in the state. However, when the Congress withdrew support from the Chandra Shekhar government in March 1991, Mulayam, too, decided to dissolve the Assembly and face an election.
But he kept the Congress in the dark about this. He drove down to Raj Bhawan at 4am and handed over the letter seeking dissolution of the Assembly. In the elections that followed, he sided with Chandra Shekhar to contest under the banner of Janata Party. But BJP took office that year – their first in UP. Shortly after that, Mulayam parted ways with Chandra Shekhar and formed his Samajwadi Party just before the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992.

Elections were held again in 1993. This time he contested with Kanshi Ram’s BSP. The Babri demolition had given him the opportunity to rise as a secular champion. And, after tying up with BSP, he added Dalits to his Muslim-Yadav(MY) base. The slogan that welcomed this combination was: ‘Mile Mulayam, Kanshi Ram, Hawa Mein Ud Gaye Jai Shri Ram’.
Mulayam won against surrendered Chambal dacoit and BJP candidate Tehsildar Singh and became CM for the second time. Then, in 1994, he withdrew all cases against ‘bandit queen’ Phoolan Devi, who was accused of the Behmai massacre. She was released from jail where she had languished for 11 years without trial. Two years later, Phoolan Devi won the Lok Sabha election from Mirzapur seat as an SP candidate. This was seen as Mulayam’s way of dispensing ‘social justice’.

The SP-BSP combination worked well for a while, but in 1995 after some SP workers attacked the state guest house in Lucknow where Mayawati was staying, BSP withdrew support. Mayawati then formed the government with BJP’s support.
After three uneventful years, Mulayam struck again, this time in Delhi. In 1998, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government fell by one vote, Sonia Gandhi went to the President with the letter of support of 272 MPs, including 26 from SP. However, Mulayam suddenly raked up Sonia’s foreign origin issue and said his party did not favour Sonia as the PM candidate.
In 2003, after BSP and BJP parted ways once again, Mulayam formed the government in UP by engineering a split in BSP and getting the support of a splinter group of the Congress.
His total unpredictability was on display again in 2012. He held a joint press conference with Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and said he was ready to support either Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee or former President APJ Abdul Kalam as the presidential candidate. But the very next day after a meeting with Sonia Gandhi (the 1998 backstabbing now a thing of the past), Mulayam promptly announced his support for Pranab Mukherjee as President.

Betrayal? Deft move? Or maybe he was just incapable of moving away from ‘charkha daav’. The last time, the patriarch used it was in 2017. The strife within the Yadav clan was at its peak. Who would inherit the party? Before anyone knew it, Mulayam had dumped his brother Shivpal Yadav and long-time aide Amar Singh and handed the mantle to his son Akhilesh Yadav.