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The demise of Mulayam Singh Yadav, on October 10, has led to a detailed chronicling of the life and times of a three-time Chief Minister of India's politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, who could have been even Prime Minister in the coalition era of 1996-98 (a honour eventually that went to HD Deve Gowda and later IK Gujral) if fellow socialists like Lalu Prasad had not opposed his name.

Politics Of Social Justice

As Yadav's life is chronicled in detail about his beginning as a follower of socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia in 1963, and winning as a candidate of the Samyukta Socialist Party in the UP assembly polls in 1967, a question has risen whether socialism as a political plank and trademark has served its time.

After all, Yadav’s career took off just when the politics of social justice had arrived in India. The same could be said for Prasad and Nitish Kumar in neighbouring Bihar. These leaders blossomed under the shadow of veterans such as Lohia, Jaya Prakash Narayan, and Acharya Narendra Deva as the warriors of social justice, and as an anti-Congress pole.

Of course, their baptism in anti-Congressism took even finer shape under the ‘JP movement’ against Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s, and culminated in the aftermath of the Emergency post-1977.

Since then, the socialist brand of politics held centrestage for almost 25 years through an era that also saw the decline of the Congress as it got mired in its omissions and commissions in governance methods.

Mandal-Kamandal

The demolition of the Babri masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 was a turning point for the socialists of all hues. A newer threat emerged for their politics in the shape of a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) even as they were boosted by the adoption of the Mandal quota for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the 1990s.

They had to position themselves against a Vajpayee-led BJP because they realised the party was actually charioted by his associate Lal Krishna Advani who had used the ‘Kamandal’ card against a caste-based regrouping under the ‘Mandal’ banner with his rath yatra for the shrine at Ayodhya.

So some of the socialists did not mind abandoning their professed antipathy towards the Congress, and joined hands with it even though they remained critical of what they said was its penchant for ‘corruption’ for the sake of power. However, they succeeded in creating a fulcrum of anti-BJP forces as the Ram temple movement saw its rise and ebb through the 1990s.

By 2002, 20 years after the demolition of the Babri masjid and outbreak of anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat after 59 Hindu pilgrims were killed in a fire inside a train near Godhra, Narendra Modi as Gujarat Chief Minister was a new challenger for them.

Thirteen year later and after winning three consecutive assembly elections, Modi was now the harbinger of a new model of faster development. As Modi’s ascent to the national political scene seemed unstoppable, the socialist leaders remained divided on their tactics as some such as Kumar who became Bihar Chief Minister with the support of the BJP, realised they risked losing the support of minorities.

Together-Apart

The joke goes that 'true socialists cannot stay together for six months and cannot stay apart for more than six months'. Kumar’s political oscillations are a good example of this. In 2015, he joined hands with Prasad to fight the BJP’s communalism. In 2017, Kumar left Prasad to join hands with the BJP to fight corruption, and finally, earlier this year, left the BJP and is now in an alliance with Prasad’s RJD to fight communalism. All this while he has remained Chief Minister!

As India gets ready for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, and many assembly polls before that, the ‘socialist’ model of politics is hardly a talking point. Yes, there are debates about the ‘freebies and welfarism versus empowerment and targeted delivery model’, but the fact still remains that Modi (and the BJP) pose a serious challenge to the opposition parties.

SUV Socialist

What caused the decline of Yadav or Prasad was that many followers of Lohia could not resist the lure of political office, they got mired in acts of corruption and nepotism, and thus abandoned the basic tenets of socialism. Their powerful aides rode on SUVs, abandoning the bicycle that was once a symbol of a dedicated socialist. Dynastic politics became their instruments of power.

Where Is The Socialist?

That brings us to the question whether a ‘samajwadi’ can survive when there is a generational shift in politics, and in the concept of ‘social justice’.

Two years ago when Ram Vilas Paswan, another Lohia follower and a minister in the Modi government, passed away, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and former governor and civil servant, raised the question: “Are any socialists left in Indian politics?”

Gandhi, who is known for his pro-Left views, wrote, "But by the question I refer to socialists in party politics, offering electoral options, political alternatives in policy-making, seeking and getting — or failing to get — voter-support for what the Constitution of India calls justice — social, economic and political. And the resounding answer is — no, not any longer. Samajwadi — socialist — as a name and style lives in the nomenclature of political parties as, indeed, it does in the preamble to our Constitution. But the old-school socialist of the mould of, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Rammanohar Lohia, Asoka Mehta, Madhu Dandavate, Mrinal Gore, S M Joshi, George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye, has become a kitab-ka-phool.”

Inconsistency has been the hallmark of the Indian socialists. Why should anybody blame only George Fernandes or Nitish Kumar for their inconsistency? Their mentor, Ram Manohar Lohia, had also displayed similar inconsistencies. Once close to Jawaharlal Nehru, Lohia turned against the Congress and even joined hands with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the precursor of the BJP) to checkmate the Congress. So did JP. That is why the Congress lost political ground to the regional forces across India.

Mulayam Singh Yadav leaves behind a party which is on the back foot, and to defeat the BJP in UP, it will have to go the extra mile — even reinvent itself. It puts out the question of whether Akilesh Yadav can do it; but more importantly it has to be seen whether or not the socialist politics followed by Mulayam Singh Yadav can cut electoral ice in the current political reality of India.

Iran, of course, is not new to protests, despite strict state control. Tehran in the recent past saw protests in 2009, against what many called fraudulent elections; in 2017, against economic stresses; and in 2019, against a hike in fuel prices. It can be argued that none of those earlier events garnered the kind of interest and support, specifically on social media, as the women-led protests that is taking place today.

However, what these protests seek to gain from an Iranian context is a whole different ball game. Political change, coupled with an ideological reorientation of a state structure is easier said than done, despite popular mobilisation against it.

The Arab Spring, from a West Asian context, perhaps remains a prime example a decade after it began to spread across the region. From Tahrir Square in Egypt to protests peppered across the Gulf region, what changed was arguably a little direction to mitigate future risk by the region’s monarchies, the political structures themselves survived. In Egypt, the ouster of Hosni Mubarak’s almost 30-year-long rule led to elections that brought a pro-Muslim Brotherhood candidate to power, alarming regional states, and the United States (US) alike. The Brotherhood government was dislodged via a coup in 2013, bringing the Egyptian Army Chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, into power.

The other challenge for such protests is the fact that geopolitics, in general, has a significant penchant to compromise with morals, ethics, and ideas in return for real-world gains. A lot of global capacity, and specifically the west, is today tied down with the Russia-Ukraine war and the protection of European borders. Whilst the strains of the West’s relations with Iran are as old as the Revolution itself, and despite the protests being independent in nature, the Iranian state’s claim that it is the US and Israel that are planning these uprisings,  aiming to attach the protests as nefarious designs purported by foreign forces against Iranian interests.

This is consistent with its response regarding other similar domestic upheavals in the past. Much like during the Arab Spring, when then-President Barack Obama had asked US-based social media companies like Twitter to keep their services online and defer any planned down maintenance, this time as well the US has looked to primarily try and give more open access to information and the internet to the protesters via technologies such as Starlink in an attempt to bypass Iranian state censors

The challenge for any social protest in Iran today is like those faced by others during the Arab Spring, that of a lack of an off-ramp. The ascent of Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s President in 2021 brought back into power the conservative section of Iranian polity, after former President Hassan Rouhani, known to be a ‘moderate’ and ‘reformist’, spent most of his tenure trying to normalise Iran’s relations with the US and negotiated with the P5+1 group of states the nuclear deal (also known as the JCPOA) which was signed in 2015 despite pushback from the conservatives.

While this would have been a watershed moment, the US unilaterally withdrawing from the deal under the presidency of Donald Trump in 2018 was a big blow to any future US-Iran rapprochement, and also to a certain extent, the Iranian moderate’s ecosystem, which did try to find its feet during previous protest movements but without much success. The failure of the JCPOA was seen by the conservatives as another example where the US proved that it could not be trusted and engaging with the same was a futile endeavour, even though negotiations to bring the deal back continue even today, albeit with much less optimism.

Over this period, the dominant clerical establishment, led by Ayatollah Khamenei, has strengthened itself to insulate itself and the state from western sanctions, and this has included closer relations with Russia and China, two countries that offer economic assistance and political partnership without strings attached in a world fast moving towards a new era of great power competition between Washington D.C. and Beijing.

The current protests are taking place under these geopolitical realities, which make it hard for movements to translate into action by states that view most events through the lens of the existential threat posed by foreign interventionism. Furthermore, if the protests are largely inclined to one city or social strata and do not gain mass traction, much like before, the government can clamp down on them without significant local blowback. Domestic corruption and economic mismanagement have also played their own role in fermenting public discontent.

According to a poll conducted in 2021 by the University of Maryland and IranPoll, a Canada-based research firm focusing on Iran, 63 percent of Iranians (out of a sample size of 1,000) blamed corruption and mismanagement more than international sanctions for economic distress.

The current protests have, in fact, gained a lot of traction, both within Iran, and internationally, with both schools and universities inside Iran seeing pushback. This is perhaps why, Ayatollah Khamenei, despite praising the police and security agencies, has not yet called for an all-encompassing hard national crackdown. Sixty percent of Iran’s population of 80 million is below the age of 30. The perception costs here may be significant for Iran if a large section of young women do not see their rights, privileges, and aspirations aligned with the state.

Saudi Arabia, perhaps still most popularly known for its ultra-conservatism, arguably realised this, and ‘defanged’ its own moral police establishment, known as the Mutawa, to portray a more “moderate” polity heralding Riyadh towards a more stable economic future beyond oil money, and looking to make itself more palatable to the international community. After these protests, Tehran risks taking this unwanted mantle from Riyadh in eyes of the international community.

The kind of real-world effect these protests will bring to Iranian politics, if any, remains to be seen. The place to witness any potential change in political course would be to keep an eye on who succeeds the 83-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei in the future, and whether this particular transfer of power would bring any fundamental political and ideological reorientation in the country, or whether it will remain business as usual.