And just when we were celebrating the remarkable sync between the two main parties — the BJP and Congress — on several important issues facing the nation, there comes the Samajwadi Party to play the party-pooper. It’s not just that Mulayam Singh Yadav wants to rename India, “Bharat”. Remember in Mulayamland English could well be banned! But at a time when words like “quotas”, “bans” and “bandhs” are being replaced by concepts like development, liberalisation, investment and reform, the Samajwadi Party’s manifesto, written perhaps by some old-style Lohiaite in Yadav’s intellectual stable, reads like a worn-out socialist document from the ’70s.Is this rhetoric from the same Mulayam Singh Yadav of the UP Development Council chairmanship fame, who had M.S. Banga, Anil Ambani and Adi Godrej advising him on development? Well, for Mulayam Singh Yadav, it seems that electoral compulsions are all that matters. This chatter about development is okay when in government, but it is the promise of quotas and the language of casteism and chauvinism that brings in the votes. He’s wrong. Politics of the kind he’s advocating belongs to the past. If Mulayam Singh Yadav aspires to be a leader in mainstream India — as undoubtedly he does — he must eschew the rhetoric of the marginal. More than reservations, what his state needs is literacy, women’s empowerment, roads, power, education, better infrastructure, access to markets at home and abroad. Similarly, Muslims want the fruits of development, not reservations that can only undo the constitutional framework. To be fair, Yadav’s manifesto writers have toned down their rhetoric and we must welcome this. At one time, they had demanded that India pull out from the WTO. Today, they merely assert that we must do so only if we are unable to keep our membership “on our terms”!In this era of coalitions, the Samajwadi Party’s manifesto also assumes national importance. Therefore we need to tell the party to go and reinvent itself more in tune with the times. Its “vision”, as of now, could leave us all blind.
