Trysting With The Tiger?

By all accounts it was a top secret mission to Mumbai. After the media attention that Samajwadi Party (SP) general secretary Amar Singh's meeting with bjp leader Narendra Modi in New Delhi generated, Mulayam Singh Yadav and his general secretary were taking no chances. But their luck didn't quite hold out. Their secretive entry into Mumbai was spotted by a photographer from the Hindi newspaper Navbharat. The picture he took did not reveal what the duo's mission was, but enquiries by the newspaper alerted the Samajwadi Party's top brass in Mumbai to Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh's presence in town.

That kicked off a cloak and dagger game, with the state executives being told that their party president was too busy to meet them. But Navbharat, which broke the story, had the details. Mulayam talked to Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray on a conference line. A meeting between the two was fixed at a five-star hotel in suburban Mumbai; though Pramod Mahajan and Amar Singh also attended, it was brief.

The secret meeting has since been picked up by leading Marathi dailies and there has been no outright denial from the Samajwadi Party's Mumbai unit. Bal Thackeray issued a half-hearted denial, saying that the stories in the press were ridiculous. However, Outlook's enquires with hotel staffers and the local police reveal that Thackeray did attend the meeting.

The SP's city president Abu Asim Azmi chose to dismiss the entire episode as a conspiracy hatched by the Congress and the bjp to tarnish Mulayam's image, when Outlook contacted him. "Chaapiye, chaapiye. Hum is par bahas chaahte hain. Yeh to ek bjp-Congress conspiracy hain. (Please publish the story. We want a debate on this issue. It's a conspiracy between the Congress and the bjp.") Interestingly, Azmi had earlier denied that Mulayam had visited Mumbai. He later revised his statement to say that the SP chief had come to the city to attend singer Sonu Nigam's sister's wedding.

The belated explanation, however, does not wash with SP supporters. They ask what was so shameful about attending a filmi reception that it had to be kept a secret from party executives to the extent that no attempts were made on the day to save the party from cracking up.

The meeting took place on the night of May 6; there was trouble brewing in the state unit of the SP. But before party leaders in the city knew what was happening, their party president and general secretary had vanished, seemingly on their way back to New Delhi. "It took them over 24 hours to surface in New Delhi," says ex-Maharashtra SP president Hussain Dalwai, who flitted between Mulayam's hotel and the mla's hostel for at least five hours before he decided to barge into his party president's room. "I was told he had checked out an hour earlier. Where did he disappear and what could have been more important to him than initiating a patch-up in his party which was at breaking point in Maharashtra?" Was it the secret meeting at the five-star that had caused Mulayam to check out of his hotel early?

The next day, a frustrated Dalwai flew to New Delhi and announced he was joining the Congress as his party was determined to join hands with fascist and communal forces. "I can't tell you what happened at the (Mulayam-Thackeray) meeting. But facts speak for themselves," he says angrily.

The "facts" referred to concern the announcement the next day by Azmi that the SP will contest 22 seats in Maharashtra in constituencies where, it went without saying, the Congress votes would get divided to the advantage of the bjp-Sena combine.The SP has a following in only six seats and prior to the Thackeray-Mulayam meeting, party leaders spoke of not contesting more than 12 seats in the state. But the SP decision, according to sources, was on the basis of an understanding struck with the Sena-bjp.

The quid pro quo? According to sources, a certain industrial house close to the SP, with real estate concerns in Maharashtra, was to be favoured in kind in return for Mulayam's newly-struck friendship. A fact confirmed by chief minister Narayan Rane's announcement barely a week after the secret tryst that the state government would regularise all unauthorised structures outside Mumbai in the next couple of months. Apart from a few slum dwellers, only one company stands to benefit by this policy decision. Tongues are already wagging in the SP rank and file, hurt that their leadership was involved in such a trade-off.

Says Dr Tushar Jagtap, a dissident SP leader who confirms that the meeting did take place, "It is completely unexplained why Mulayam has done what he has. Perhaps, apart from the 22 seats, there is a bigger political game involved which will emerge closer to the election schedule. All that I can say now is that this, combined with the trade-off with the bjp, has led to complete disenchantment among Mulayam's supporters in Mumbai. Muslims are waiting in large numbers to swing to the Congress."

Adds Tushar Gandhi, great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who recently quit the SP: "There may be no videograph of this meeting but there is no smoke without fire. I didn't even have wind of Mulayam's presence in the city and I was the vice-president of the city executive. So I saw no alternative but to quit a party which seems to be ganging up with the Mahatma's killers."

The Urdu papers in the city are full of the quandary faced by Muslims, though some still see Mulayam as a hero and accuse the media of targeting him. But even sympathisers acknowledge the hush-hush way in which Mulayam arrived in and vanished from the city lends credence to reports that he was up to something he could not admit.

The dissent in the Maharashtra unit of the SP in the last fortnight has acquired murky overtones, with Azmi stating that the dissent was a Congress conspiracy-aicc general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad had offered him Rs 2 crore and a Rajya Sabha seat to fracture the SP unit in Mumbai, he said. But Kripa Shankar Singh, mpcc general secretary, strongly denies this. "Actually it was Azmi who asked," he says. "But can you imagine our embarrassment if he were to be seen standing beside Sonia at a public meeting? How could the Congress justify allotting a Rajya Sabha seat to a man with criminal cases against him?" Azmi was a tada accused in the Mumbai blasts case, though recently discharged; he has also been implicated in the shoes scam.

Azmi in turn accuses Dalwai of accepting Rs 3 crore from the Congress to break from the SP: Dalwai retaliated by slapping a notice of defamation against his former city president. "I am here without bargains. I have asked for nothing and received nothing." Only respect and honour, which he and other SP executives were denied by even Azmi. "Which other party leader would ignore the outrage of a city president asking for the dismissal of a state president?" he queries.

Meanwhile, Thackeray's uncharacteristically weak denial, which dismissed the story as laughable but lacked his usual bombast, has added to the worries of Mulayam's supporters. They know that Mulayam's Muslim vote bank must remain intact if the SP is to thwart Congress prospects in September.

While a Sena confidante admitted that "one of our top leaders might have met one of their top men", last week, Mulayam's Muslim supporters are miffed that he should be doing business with Thackeray after having thrown them, literally, to the wolf-or rather the tiger-last year. At a joint rally with Laloo Prasad Yadav in Mumbai, Mulayam stated that Rs 2,000 crore should be gifted to Pakistan for its development. The Muslim community was appalled: as expected, Thackeray pounced on the statement and was delighted to have found a new reason to target them all over again.

They may not have voiced their opinions then, but they do now: "If you do have Rs 2,300 crore to spare, give it to the poor Indian Muslims. Why should you help Pakistan at our cost?" The very same Muslims who ask these queries are now queuing up before the Congress office and demanding assurances from Congress leaders. "The community should know what you intend to do for us," one Muslim leader said flatly at a meeting with former Lok Sabha speaker Shivraj Patil last week.

While the Congress is still thinking up answers to that query, Patil was scathing about the intentions of the Mulayam-Thackeray meet. "You go against all your principles and team up with opposing ideologies with just a single purpose: to thwart the Congress. And then you talk of stability. Can it happen?"

Mulayam and Thackeray certainly seem to believe it can.