Memo to Mulayam: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk!

In an iconic scene from the sphaghetti Western cult classic The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the bandit Tuco ‘The Ugly’ Ramirez, played by the endearing Eli Wallach, is surprised in his bath by the one-armed bounty-hunter Al Mulock, who has murderous intentions.  Bursting into the bathroom, waving a gun in his left hand, Mulock breaks into a triumphalist monologue. “I’ve been looking for you for eight months,” he tells the beady-eyed Tuco, who appears to have been caught off-guard in the bathtub. “Now, I find you in exactly the position that suits me. And I’ve had lots of time to learn how to shoot with my left hand.” Perhaps he’d have had lots more to say, but at that point, Tuco unloads several rounds from his gun, which had been tucked away beneath the soapsuds. As Mulock staggers away to his death, Tuco offers him a bit of laconic advice: “When you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk!” That’s the kind of advice that Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav needs today. Virtually everyday, he and his party leaders have been dropping dark hints that their party’s parliamentary support (from the outside) for the UPA government will be withdrawn soon enough, and that early parliamentary elections are likely. Mulayam Singh has even compared the UPA’s coalition management skills unfavourably to the NDA’s, which is something of a sacrilege for the “secular” orthodoxy. [caption id=“attachment_508152” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  So far, Mulayam Singh Yadav has only fired blanks. Reuters[/caption] And yet, at every turn, Mulayam Singh and his party have failed to walk their blustery talk, and bailed out the UPA government time after time. That political instinct was encapsulated most vividly last year when Mulayam Singh fled from Parliament - his dhoti hoisted knee-high to assist speed of locomotion - to enable the government to press ahead with the FDI-in-retail proposal. The supreme irony of that situation: Mulayam Singh claimed, to newspersons outside Parliament, that he was himself opposed to the FDI-in-retail proposal, but did  not wish to vote against it in Parliament. In recent days, Samajwadi Party leaders have been playing the same old brinkmanship games. At a time when the UPA was reeling from the prospect of seeing the DMK walk out of the coalition, the Samajwadi Party was likewise hinting at withdrawing its support to the UPA in response to Beni Prasad Verma’s verbal fusillade against ‘‘Netaji’ Mulayam.  But when push actually came to shove, they were assuaged by what they said was a “personal apology” from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to Mulayam Singh. Even today, Beni Prasad Verma continues to nip to Mulayam Singh’s heels: on Monday, Verma criticised Mulayam Singh for praising BJP leader LK Advani’s sagacity. But having swallowed their pride, Samajwadi Party leaders have perforce to deal with it - unless of course they are really ready to pull the plug. All  of these -  the political brinkmanship, double-crossing and backroom deals with the UPA - are par for the course for the wily Mulayam Singh Yadav. Ahead of the Presidential election last year, he led a vainglorious Mamata Banerjee to believe he was with her at a time when she was testing her relationship with the Congress. He eventually forced her to walk the political plank and opt out of the UPA. But at a propitious moment, Mulayam Singh disassociated himself from Mamata Banerjee, whose exit effectively enhanced the Samajwadi Party’s leverage over  the UPA. What we’re seeing today - the daily dose of political brinkmanship and blackmail about imminent withdrawal of support - is just the foreplay for the striking of another seedy backroom deal.  When a person holds out a threat, the only real test of the genuineness of that threat is whether the person has it in him to pull the trigger. On another note, Mulayam Singh has been talking up the prospects of a Third Front - independent of the two main political formations - whose time, he says, has come. It is easy to see where he is coming from. Mulayam Singh has long nursed prime ministerial ambitions, and he cannot for the life of him figure out why - in a political ecosystem that has even thrown up featherweight Prime Ministers like HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujaral - his number hasn’t come up yet. In the emerging political landscape ahead of the next general elections, he sees what may be one of his last chances to make it the top. The UPA stands discredited, but the perception is that the NDA isn’t quite best placed to capitalise on the anti-incumbency vote. Political analysts who have worked their numbers ( here) reckon that the next election will throw up an unstable political arrangement, which will be short-lived, and perhaps result in another election a year or so later. It is this political uncertainty that Mulayam Singh Yadav is looking to exploit to his advantage. In his estimation, the emergence of a Third Front offers him his best chance to unfurl the tricolour at the Red Fort. Too bad for him that the numbers don’t favour the emergence of such a disparate arrangement - or its electoral success. As this editorial points out, “the idea of the Third Front remains as inchoate, if not more, as it was in its earlier versions. It lacks a centrepiece — none of the regional parties can gather a large enough number of seats to give it internal solidity. It also lacks a theme song — both anti-Congressism, which briefly became the glue for the National Front, and anti-BJP-ism that held together the short-lived United Fronts, were compromised several times over and have lost their binding force. Since then, the Third Front has failed to nurture another idea — say, federalism — that could engage all its potential members, straddle and subdue their several conflicting interests and teeming internal contradictions.” Even so, Mulayam Singh Yadav is looking to, as the idom goes, muddy the waters in the  hope of catching the fish. There’s nothing wrong in nursing prime ministerial ambitions, but it helps to know for it then frames the context in which he says what he says and does what he does. It also explains why he ends up talking when he should, if he is serious about his threat, be pulling the trigger.