Mulayam: No true friend or foe in politics

This wrestler-turned-politician from Saifai village of Etawah is set to determine the contour of politics in 2004. 2003 saw Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav undergoing a political transformation.

Till the beginning of 2003, Yadav was wary of losing a substantial political ground in UP. The perception was Yadav would never be able to come to power on his own.

His Muslim-Yadav support base enabled him to win a respectable number of seats, but not majority. The possibility of Muslims drifting away if he remained out of power, was a big worry.

In UP, Yadav had only enemies, no friends. Perhaps, his exposure to the corporate world and the Bollywood, courtesy Amar Singh, has brought about a change in his personality.

In 1998, Yadav learnt the most important lesson of pragmatic politics""there is no permanent friend or foe in politics. Shortly after the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government fell by one vote, Yadav met the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani and assured them that he would not support the Italy-born Sonia Gandhi come what may.

That he stood to his ground has endeared him to the Sangh Parivar and the BJP leadership""a situation unthinkable during 1991-1996, when Yadav earned the epithet of "Maulana Mulayam" coined by the same Sangh Parivar.

Yadav's friendship with the BJP continued to flourish even when the BJP sewed up an alliance with Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

On August 26, when Mayawati recommended dissolution of the Assembly, Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh pitched for Yadav's elevation to the chief minister's post.

Even as Yadav is consolidating his position, there is hardly any doubt that he is surviving as the chief minister because of his "friends" in the BJP.

Having conquered the turf in Lucknow, Yadav has set his eyes on Delhi. In the era of coalition politics, he is aware of the magic of numbers. He knows his political interests could be protected only if he could grab the secular space in UP, reducing the Congress to margins.

If Yadav's strategy succeeds and his party bags 40 Lok Sabha seats from UP, he will don the role of either the king or the king-maker. And he will have political options of either going with the NDA or join the coalition with the Congress minus Sonia.

At last, he can reaffirm his faith in the belief that ideologies and friendship keep changing in the pragmatic politics.