Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) has clearly emerged as the star of the Lok Sabha 2024 elections. After a string of electoral losses since 2017, the party’s victory in 37 of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh (UP) has made Akhilesh a key force that contained the BJP in the state. Is this a moment of resurgence for a party that had claimed to be the face of ‘social justice’ in North India? Political experts exercise caution and say that this is a victory of the SP-Congress alliance and a product of disillusionment with the BJP. “The SP-INC campaign wasn’t anything out of their ordinary campaigns,” says political scientist Gilles Verniers, an expert on UP politics. “What happened in UP is really voter-driven rather than party-led,” he argues. Yet, as Verniers explains, the core ideas based on which the SP had been founded and gained popularity in UP sit in very well now. “What the BJP is trying to achieve is Hindu unity under a religious ethnic identity and a slow erasure of caste differences. The counter-narrative to that would be to say that you cannot ignore caste as the cause of inequality, but also as the instrument to address the social inequalities,” he says. Even though the party underwent a decline and saw its image getting sullied on account of being associated with ‘elitism’ and ‘goondaism’, at its inception, the SP’s ideology of socialism centred around caste had found a broad-based acceptance in the region. The SP's emergence from caste-based socialism Formed in October 1992, the Samajwadi Party claimed the legacy of Ram Manohar Lohia’s version of socialism. Born in 1910 at Akbarpur in UP’s Faizabad district, in the 1930s, Lohia had emerged as one of the foremost socialist thinkers and political actors in India. His idea of socialism, however, was markedly different from that of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress. Where Nehruvian socialism was caste-blind, Lohia put caste at the centre of his idea of social justice. In Lohia’s view, the inequalities of Indian society were centred around caste and had to be seen in intersection with other forms of social stratification, particularly that of gender. “All war on poverty is a sham, unless it is at the same time, a conscious and sustained war on these two segregations,” he wrote in 1963 (as cited by Verniers in his 2018 article ‘Conservative in Practice: The Transformation of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh’). Consequently, he called for a unified social alliance among all marginalised groups, including Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis, and asked for them to be mobilised politically. Lohia, in fact, was among a generation of socialist thinkers who put caste at the centre of socialism. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu was based on the same ideology. Similarly, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar, which came into being just a few years after the SP, was also a product of a caste-based socialist ideology. Lohia had translated his ideologies into founding the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, which was a socialist caucus within the Congress. His growing disillusionment with the leadership within the Congress led him to quit the party in 1946. Consequently, he became the general secretary of the Praja Socialist Party (PSP), a product of the merger between the Socialist Party and the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party (KMPP) of Acharya Kripalani. In 1956, Lohia quit the PSP in opposition to the party’s decision to ally with the Congress. He then formed the Socialist Party (Lohia), which merged with the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP) in 1965. It was through an SSP ticket that Mulayam Singh Yadav first entered the UP Legislative Assembly in 1967. Political scientist A K Verma in an article written for Economic and Political Weekly in 2004 explains that since 1967, Mulayam “played a significant role in shaping the future of the socialist movement, atleast in Uttar Pradesh”. The many splits before the Samajwadi Party was formed After Lohia’s death in 1967, Mulayam joined the Bharatiya Kranti Dal founded by Chaudhary Charan Singh in 1967. Singh, best remembered for his pro-farmer land and agrarian reform initiatives, had been pursuing the consolidation of the socialist camp in UP after Lohia’s death and became the first non-Congress chief minister of the state in April 1967. In 1974, Singh reorganised politically and founded the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), a product of the merger of seven anti-Congress parties. After the Emergency, in 1977, the BLD formed an alliance with the Jana Sangh and the Congress (O) to defeat the Congress. While the alliance was hugely successful in the state, it could not stay together. Tensions with the Jana Sangh led to the socialist bloc splitting, with Singh and Raj Narain forming the Janata Party (Secular) in 1979. In October 1984, Singh formed yet another party, the Dalit Mazdoor Kisan Party (DMKP), and Mulayam was made head of its UP unit. Since the early 1980s, Singh gradually began withdrawing from active politics and the party, which was by then renamed Lok Dal, was primarily managed by Mulayam. In his article, Verma notes that while Singh had challenged the Congress on the ground that it would represent the interests of the rural peasantry, it had failed to define the intersections between class and caste among them. “The more prosperous Jat peasants of western UP and the more numerous but poor ‘kisans’ of eastern UP could not constitute a common political platform,” he writes. Soon after Charan Singh’s death in 1987, the party split into Lok Dal (A) led by Charan Singh’s son Ajit Singh and represented the interests of the prosperous Jat farmers of Western UP. On the other hand, Lok Dal (B) was led by H N Bahuguna and enjoyed support among the lower and middle peasantry and the lower castes. Mulayam joined Lok Dal (B). He quit the party soon after to join the Janata Dal which was formed in 1988. In 1990, when the Janata Dal split, Mulayam joined the faction led by Chandra Shekhar. In 1992, he broke away once again, this time to form his own party – the Samajwadi Party – along with his brother Shivpal Yadav. A party for Yadavs The creation of SP by Mulayam Singh Yadav took place against the backdrop of two major political events that altered the course of history in India. One was the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in August 1990 by then prime minister VP Singh that granted reservations to the OBCs. Second was the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. The SP was a direct beneficiary of both these incidents. “The Mandal Commission had created polarisation in all socialist parties on caste lines although Mulayam Singh Yadav later became beneficiary of this process but incidentally he had sided with anti-VP Singh group in Janata Dal,” says Arvind Kumar, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London. The SP claimed to consolidate a political base among the OBCs. It also formed an understanding with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that had been formed in 1984 by Kanshi Ram to politically empower the Dalits. The SP-BSP alliance contested the 1993 Assembly elections and was successful in forming the government. Mulayam hoped to bring together the backward castes and the Dalits and form a backward class constituency in UP. This was not easy to sustain as the Dalits had always been exploited by the OBCs. Fissures between the two were evident soon after they came to power and SP emerged as the more dominant party. The conflict turned particularly ugly and the alliance broke off in 1995 when Mayawati was allegedly attacked by SP goons at a Lucknow guest house where she was holding a meeting with her party workers. The next time that the two parties came together was more than 20 years later in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, but that too did not last. Muslims were the other main political constituency of the SP. The Babri Masjid riots had alienated Muslim votes from the Congress and the SP capitalised on this. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s promise to protect the mosque against all odds earned him the title of ‘Mullah Mulayam’. When it came to the OBCs though, a big drawback of the SP was that it managed to consolidate a political base only among a small section of elites of the backward castes, that of the Yadavs. “The concentration of the Samajwadi Party on his core Yadav base was not merely a strategic choice but also the outcome of decades of formation and crystallisation of a political identity among Yadavs,” writes Verniers in his 2018 article. “Through the second half of the twentieth century, they have been the largest block of supporters of the main socialist parties in UP. Their mobilisation was further reinforced by the invention of a mythical common past and religion, which were used to justify the Yadavs’ natural gift for politics and therefore their entitlement to its benefits,” he writes. It is also to be noted that the culture of entitlement among the Yadavs would rely on muscular politics. “Since its inception, the Samajwadi Party would be largely associated with the notion of goonda raj, or the rule of thugs,” Verniers further writes. He then explains that the party’s caste preference was evident from the way it distributed party tickets initially. Nearly half of its tickets were given to OBC candidates and half of these were Yadavs, which resulted in a large representation of Yadavs among the party’s MLAs. “Actually, the region to which Mulayam Singh Yadav belonged- Etawah-Mainpuri-Farukkhabad- Firozabad had a dominant class of Yadav landlords which ensured their safe lead in electoral politics,” says Kumar. “With time, as SP acquired the image of being a party for Yadavs, all other parties also stayed away from the community,” he adds. “A big limitation of the North Indian socialists is that to be effective politically, they had to rely on groups that were dominant within the category they were seeking to mobilise. It had to do with party leadership and organisation,” explains Verniers. He goes on to explain that “when Mulayam Singh created SP, he used his affiliation to the Yadav caste to form the core of his party”. This, he says, was markedly different from what happened in the south, where backward caste movements had started much earlier at the turn of the century. Moreover, in the south, the backward castes were in a majority numerically, thereby shifting the balance of power in their favour. Political scientist Neelanjan Sircar echoes Vernier’s thoughts when he argues that “social mobility in these parts of North India was very much tied to certain communities being able to organise and collectively mobilise and move up the ranks”. “It was not just the Yadavs, but also the Jats and Gurjars. These are dominant, landowning, upwardly mobile backward caste groups,” he says. Although the SP was unsuccessful in its mission to unify all backward castes, Sircar argues that they had still brought about a sort of social revolution. “We must not underplay what Mandal politics and OBC parties did in breaking down upper caste dominance of upper caste actors and parties,” he says. “Yes, the SP has left a legacy of violence and ‘goondaism’, but it was also a genuine, democratic pushback against upper caste dominance,” Sircar adds. The SP’s electoral performance peaked in 2012 when they won the state elections with a sweeping majority and Mulayam installed his son Akhilesh Yadav as the chief minister. Soon after Akhilesh came to power though, two major incidents served a huge blow to the party’s image. First was the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 which left more than 60 people dead and about 50,000 displaced. The second was the poor investigation that followed the gangrape of two teenage girls in Badaun in 2014, which alienated much of the party’s OBC voter base. “By then the SP had become associated with elitism, preferential treatment of its core voter base as also with crime and ‘goondaism’,” says Verniers. The situation had convinced Akhilesh of the need for the party to break away from the caste-based, dynastic electoral strategy. His efforts were visible when he tried to keep the infamous ‘dons’ of UP away from his party, thereby frequently coming into conflict with his father and uncle. The decline of the SP since 2012 was also facilitated by the unprecedented rise of the BJP which managed to consolidate a strong voter base among the Hindus. Samajwadi Party 2.0 Although the disenchantment with the BJP is indeed the most important factor leading to the success of the SP in the 2024 elections, the efforts being made by Akhilesh in refashioning his party must not be missed. Political scientist Sudha Pai, in a recent article in The Indian Express, notes that “Akhilesh single handedly created an anti-BJP front of smaller OBC and Dalit parties, and the Babasaheb Vahini to attract Dalit votes. Positioning himself as the leader of the “pichhda”, he changed the election discourse to a battle between Hindutva and social justice”. He made further efforts to shed his party’s image as a Muslim-Yadav party by giving tickets to only five Yadavs and distributing the rest to a diverse group of non-Yadav OBC candidates. Is this the re-emergence of caste-based social justice in UP? Perhaps only time will tell.
