Tracing the strands of a life lived in a maze of power play often includes jostling with the larger historical register of the politics of a particular era. Political biographies usually struggle with this task, varying in how they handle it. There is also the challenge of what writer James Atlas saw as a biographer’s tightrope walk – the balance between avoiding the “tedious march of facts” while also embracing the “no detail is too small” rule.

In some ways, journalist Sobhana K Nair’s Ram Vilas Paswan: The Weathervane of Indian Politics steers clear of this dilemma by limiting the ambition of her account of the life and times of the former union minister.

Instead, Nair develops skeletal details to piece together elements of continuity and change in Paswan’s journey. In the process, the book turns its gaze to the political context and social milieu that went into the making of over five decades of Paswan’s public life. 

The subtext of the book’s title hints at the imagery of political promiscuity and nimble expediency that Paswan evokes while being dubbed the “weathervane of Indian politics”. Nair detachedly looks at Paswan’s line of reasoning in the context of current political alternatives and interests. This partly explains how he became part of a cabinet of six prime ministers while also decoding the array of his swift moves – even somersaults – across the political spectrum at the centre in Delhi.

At the same time, Nair’s book intermittently reflects on Paswan’s episodic relevance and unrealised potential in the state politics of Bihar. This includes an oddly haunting spell of indecision at a crucial juncture in 2005. The account, however, gets sketchy while straddling different impulses of the political matrix in Delhi and Patna. For instance, her fleeting references to the dynamics of political forces at work in Bihar, and how Paswan viewed them, could have been developed further, even if that meant widening the narrative canvas of the book. But that does not take away from the book’s useful account of converging and diverging factors that shaped Paswan’s approach to the dual spheres of national and state politics.

In her use of primary and secondary sources, Nair goes beyond the patchy journalistic profiles of Paswan that abound in the news media. This includes her visit to Paswan’s village of Saharbani in Alauli subdivision of Khagaria district in the flood-prone Koshi region of Bihar. She traces Paswan’s formative years in the Dalit-majority village and his education in the district town of Khagaria. This precedes a decisive trade-off he made in 1969 by foregoing his selection to the post of deputy superintendent of police. Instead, he successfully contested the polls to become Alauli MLA as a candidate from the Samyukta Socialist Party.

Amid the vagaries of electoral politics, the account of subsequent years shows Paswan emerging as the protégé of Jayaprakash Narayan during the Emergency years – a thread that runs through a whole generation of Lohiaite leaders. As he got into the Janata Party fold, the book recounts his resounding win in the Lok Sabha polls of 1977 from Hajipur, a constituency that would become synonymous with his political positioning.

But The Weathervane of Indian Politics misses the chance to examine why Paswan could not build a larger constituency of Ambedkarite politics in Bihar. There was an opening for it in the early 1970s as the “Congress system”, the term Rajni Kothari used for the umbrella party, was showing serious strains. This was also a time when the Jagjivan Ram-led representation in the party was inadequate to hold the Congress social base. It was a “coalition of extremes”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Brass to describe the core voter base in a state of upper castes and Dalits. 

Did the Karpoori Thakur-led stream of socialist politics and backward empowerment – reinforced by 1978 measures like the implementation of quotas recommended by the Mungeri Lal commission – subsume a separate strand of Dalit politics? Couldn’t the Dalit Sena, formed by Paswan in the 1980s, foresee the carving out of the Mahadalit category more than two decades later? Or the emergence of segmented Dalit political voices like Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular)?

These are questions Nair could have probed beneath the surface. But to her credit, the book has enough clues to infer that once Paswan was ensconced in the power corridors of Delhi, and particularly after being an incidental face of the Mandal quota implementation in 1990, he fancied a national role for himself. That implied that even if he was willing to be used as a mascot of Dalit identity politics, he was keen to cultivate cross-sectional acceptability.

There are a few episodes in the account where Nair employs the hindsight of the present to make a comment in retrospect. One such remark was on the improbability of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s intervention in Parliament during a debate after the Gujarat riots of 2002. The book rues that the majoritarian thrust of current politics left no space for the critique Mulayam gave to the majority community’s version of events. 

But such hindsight could also be extended to another important question: Didn’t downplaying the majority community’s grievances, or perceptions about it, fuel feelings of political neglect among the majority as well as resentment against the appeasement of minorities? Didn’t that strengthen the appeal of political forces willing to acknowledge the other side of grievances?

It’s a significant question that many pluralistic formations and multicultural societies face. In Britain, for instance, political thinker Roger Scruton had asked for the careful handling of prioritising grievances. He was of the view that, like all groups in society and only as much as other groups, the majority “needs not only be not ignored, but it also needs to be respected”. As this could be easily misunderstood, it’s important here to note that Scruton was asking for the majority not to be “ignored” and “respected” only as much as other groups in society.

Nair’s account also teases the reader with anecdotes that spur an inevitable question: Could a leader of flexible political allegiance like Paswan have ideological beliefs tucked in somewhere? In her introductory note, Nair explains how as a minister in the BJP-led NDA in 2018, Paswan had shared with her his unease with the government’s crackdown on activists in connection with the Bhima Koregaon case. Recalling his early years in politics, he even admitted that he preferred naxalism to democracy, perhaps hinting at how democratic processes moderated his ideological tilt.

While narrating this conversation, Nair talks about how in the aftermath, the phrase “urban naxals” was “introduced to public lexicon” to target “any anti-establishment person who may or may not be inclined to the Left”.

Interestingly, journalist Sourjya Bhowmick’s book Gangster State (2021), an account of the rise and fall of the CPIM in West Bengal, has a different take on the origins of the phrase in political circles, if not the public lexicon. Bhowmick said the phrase was actually coined by the SFI, the student wing of the CPIM.

“The posters across the university campus had little to talk about the campus and more about Nandigram and the up-and-coming threat – ‘urban naxals’. The term would gain national prominence much later. In 2007, the term was used within the SFI circles to brand students of Jadavpur University and Presidency. Anyone who sported a ponytail, had a beard, had a shabby look and wore t-shirts that carried sociopolitical messages were considered the new enemy, aka urban Naxal, for the party,” Bhowmick writes.

As Nair’s account covers the long arc of Paswan’s journey, there can be many omissions or points of contention. Some come to mind, such as how an absurd moment from Paswan’s poll campaign is missing – the usage of an Osama bin Laden lookalike in electioneering. One remembers it not only for its comic absurdity but also for how it made Paswan, his Lok Janshakti Party, and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal – contesting as rivals – open to allegations of practising appeasement politics.

In 2004, Paswan had sought to use Meraj Khalid Noor, a Muslim man who resembled bin Laden, to woo Muslim voters in the Lok Sabha polls. A year later, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav crowed “Paswan ji ka Osama bin Laden mere paas aa gaya” as he paraded Noor during the 2005 assembly polls in Bihar. Lalu was exuding glee after snatching away Paswan’s star campaigner.

In fact, Noor’s significance to Paswan and Lalu’s campaign plans can be gauged from the fact that The Telegraph reported that his “seat in the helicopter was permanently booked with Paswan and Lalu Prasad, even at the cost of dropping other recognised political leaders”.

But setting aside such minor omissions or oversights, Nair’s book offers taut coordinates of Paswan’s journey through power alleys and his interplay with variables and political currents across five decades. Nair’s account is dispassionate enough not to fall for how Paswan might have pitched his politics as “principled pragmatism” while being willing to offer the wider frame to place his responses to political tides of his time.

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