The following are excerpts from Sobhana K. Nair’s latest book Ram Vilas Paswan: The Weathervane of Indian Politics. Publisher: Roli Books.How often does a taunt from an adversary become the defining anthem of your life? Probably every now and then. But how many times does one actually have the capacity to wear it as a badge of honour? Almost never.No one can quite remember how Ram Vilas Paswan came to be known as ‘mausam vaigyanik’ or the weathervane of Indian politics. By some accounts, it was the vernacular media that initially gave him this title for his prescient political shifts.But political commentator Abhay Kumar credits Lalu Prasad Yadav for coming up with an apt phrase to describe his political adversary’s peripatetic career. Lalu used it at public meetings to mock Paswan’s ideological agnosticism that allowed him to cross over many boundaries. Most certainly he repeated it enough times for the label to stick.Paswan flipped it on its head. “I don’t know whether he (Yadav) meant it as a compliment. But let me tell you I have never joined any political front after they came to power. In fact, the alliance that I was part of has always come to power,” he told me smilingly, waiting for my reaction.It was January 2019 and we were sitting in his lavish sitting room at 12 Janpath, one of the biggest Lutyens’ Delhi bungalow with its cream-coloured leather sofa, red lamps strategically placed around the room throwing a warm glow, deep-brown smooth marble tables, and a large silver peacock statue studded with colourful stones glinting at our subject.He wanted himself to be seen as the master strategist who could gauge ‘janata ka mind’ due to his direct connection with the hearts of his voters as opposed to his blundering colleagues who often found themselves blindsided by the vagaries of public opinion.Paswan may have artfully given the comment a positive spin but it was not entirely misplaced. At the time of the interview, he had already worked for five prime ministers beginning his stint in cabinet in 1989 under prime minister V.P. Singh, a socialist. He was then serving in his sixth cabinet under Narendra Modi, the most popular right-wing prime minister the country has had. His ideological trajectory was hardly linear.In 1969, when Paswan won his first assembly election in Bihar, he was a socialist and fiercely anti-Congress. When he entered Parliament as a first time MP in 1977, he had burnished his identity as a Congress-baiter. In the first three decades of his career, he was equally critical of the Jana Sangh and its later avatar the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) barring a close to three-year engagement in between. But in the last six years of his political career, he had turned into BJP’s cohort. His hyperbolic statements on Prime Minister Narendra Modi made him sound more like a crony.On October 8, 2020, at 6:05 pm, Ram Vilas Paswan passed away at the Escorts Hospital in Delhi, where he had been undergoing treatment for nearly two months for complications arising out of heart failure and kidney shutdown. He was 74 years old.In the obituary published in the next day’s newspaper, three phrases that were commonly used to describe him in the many obituaries were “weather vane of Indian politics”, “political opportunist” and “Dalit leader”.The title of ‘Dalit leader’ is the least contentious of the three – though many of his critics claim that he was merely a bobblehead Dalit, strategically placed at the cabinet table to tick the boxes. It is not as if he had rich pickings of the ministries in the six cabinets he served in. Barring the brief period between June 1996 to March 1998 when he was the Union Railway Minister in Deve Gowda and later the I.K. Gujaral cabinet, Paswan did not head any meaty portfolio.Paswan together with Lalu Prasad Yadav (centre) and Amar Singh (left) at a party rally in Mumbai during the 2009 general elections. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Al Jazeera English/CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED.I had a curious conversation with Paswan in August 2018, which throws light on what this identity meant for him. As a reporter for The Hindu, I had gone to meet him in the context of the arrests of activists and academicians Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves and Gautam Navlakha by the Pune police for their alleged involvement in Elgar Parishad (Congress for Speaking Aloud). The Elgar Parishad itself was a curtain raiser of sorts for a yearly celebration of the ‘Battle of Bhima Koregaon’. In 1818, it was during this battle that Dalit soldiers of the British army, mostly Mahars, trounced the troops of the local ruler, Peshwa Bajirao II, a Brahmin. Every year on January 1, Ambedkarite Dalits gather at Bhima Koregaon to pay their respect at the Vijay Sthamb (Victory Pillar).The year 2018 was to be the 200th commemoration of the battle. However, that year saw violent clashes between Dalit and Maratha groups instead, resulting in the death of at least one person and injuries to several others.Against the backdrop of these arrests, the phrase ‘Urban Naxals’ was introduced to the public lexicon by the ruling government, and has since been weaponised against any anti-establishment person who may or may not be inclined to the Left.As the Dalit face of the Narendra Modi government, I had hoped that Paswan would have a view. He did, except, he did not want it to be printed. He did not weigh in on the arrests but instead spoke about the term ‘Urban Naxals’. He cringed at it and said, “A bit of Naxalism is essential. If the Dalits do not agitate they will not get their rights.” While he was clear on his ideological position, he wasn’t willing to voice it publicly. It could have easily cost him his cabinet berth. “I was more inclined towards Naxalism than democracy when I began my political life,” he proclaimed, without caring to explain his reasons for saying so.The conversation then veered to religion. “I never grew up as a believer, and in my youth, I was an avowed atheist. I can no longer proclaim myself as one now,” he said. So has he now turned into a believer? “Not really. I just don’t stay away from pujas or other ritualistic ceremonies that happen at home. After all, I have to keep my family in good humour,” he said.Here was a man who was struggling against his own convictions and beliefs. The inherent contradictions between personal beliefs and professional compulsions are worth telling.§Ahead of the 1996 elections, Delhi corridors were abuzz with predictions about a possible sweep by the BJP. Many armchair analysts claimed that even if the BJP did not get the magic number, it would come close enough to rule comfortably for the next five years.All predictions came to nought. BJP emerged as the single largest party with 161 seats but was far behind the majority mark.The Congress was a close runner-up with 140 seats. Social scientist Rajani Kothari described the results thus:The Indian electorate, by giving what the media calls a fractured verdict, desires something quite different from what has been provided so far by the Congress, the Communist, and the two combinations of anti-Congress parties in 1977 and 1989, the electorate too was not all that clear or united in its thinking in doing this; in large parts it was found to be exercising its vote almost in a fit of absent-mindedness, no doubt still turning up in large numbers despite the searing heat and the absence of any vigorous campaign or sense of excitement around them, but in many ways apathetic and resigned to whatever may happen.At 161 seats, BJP’s tally was still impressive; they added 40 new seats to their tally (BJP was at 120 in 1991). It was certainly a jump, but not the leap that they needed. Half of the country remained averse to the BJP. Barring six seats in Karnataka, the party could not win any seats in the four southern states – Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Significantly, the Congress won fourteen seats less than what it got in 1977 when it was bruised in the Janata wave. President Shankar Dayal Sharma invited A.B. Vajpayee as the leader of the single largest party to form the government.On May 27, the thirteenth day after Vajpayee took over as prime minister, his government faced the Parliament for a Motion of Confidence. Perhaps, well aware of the bleak outcome of the vote, Vajpayee pugnaciously began the speech by saying: The biggest allegation levelled against us is that we are a communal party and we lack secular credentials. Let all the guardians of the so-called secularism unite and vote the BJP out of power. Democracy is a game of numbers that is not in our favour. But we have got the largest popular mandate.Paswan as general secretary of the Janata Dal was the third speaker. The mandate, he said, was not in favour of any one political party, it was in favour of a coalition government and in favour of the ‘secular forces’. Paswan would work twice with the BJP in his lifetime. But if one was to read his speech from the Confidence Motion in isolation, it would be difficult to imagine that he could ever evolve a working relationship with the saffron party.The ‘Ram Rath’ in September 1990 was brought on the road, he stated, only to stall the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. It was brought on to ‘usurp the rights of the poor.’Next, he came to the ‘Hindu Nation’ theory, demolishing it brick by brick. In all the states currently (1996), he stated that there were only Hindu chief ministers, be it Prafulla Kumar Mahanta in Assam,J.B. Patnaik in Odisha, Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar or Sahib Singh Verma in Delhi, and so on. Paswan asked, “Till now no Muslim has become chief minister of any state. The president, vice president and the prime minister are Hindus. Hindus occupy ninety-nine per cent of government jobs. Then why is the slogan of ‘Hindu Nation’ being raised again and again?”* Even if the country, he said, was to become a ‘Hindu Nation’, what more could a Hindu get?The core essence of Paswan’s argument opposing the ‘Hindu Nation’ may have been valid but it was factually incorrect. Until May 1996, keeping Jammu & Kashmir aside, the country had seven chief ministers and none of them had completed a full term. A.R. Antulay remains (till 2023) the last Muslim chief minister that the country (outside of J&K) saw. He served in Maharashtra from June 1980 to January 1982 remaining in the seat for less than two years.Criticising the BJP for their Opposition to reservation for the backwards, Paswan then asked, “Are Yadav, Kurmi, Kori, Nai, Teli, Tamoli, Luhar, Kumhar, Chaurasia, Barhai, Mallah, Nishad, Bheel, Paswan and Chamar (various backward and Dalit castes) not Hindu?”In several of his parliamentary speeches from 1977 onwards, Paswan has again and again, revisited the question of the origin of Muslims in India and the RSS propaganda on Mughals. “It has repeatedly been said that Muslims are the progeny of Babar who came here in 1526. When he came here, Ibrahim Lodhi was on the throne. Before Ibrahim Lodhi, the Khilji dynasty was in power and before that Tughlaq dynasty was ruling India. Before the Tughlaq Dynasty, there was the Slave Dynasty and before that Mohammad Ghori was the ruler of India. All these rulers were not Hindus,” he said.The Dalits, he said, embraced Islam to escape the humiliations they had to suffer daily under a Brahminical Hindu order. After the Babri Masjid demolition, the BJP had become a pariah. They had accepted the offer of President Shankar Dayal Sharma in the hope that they would be able to gather allies and tease away MPs from smaller parties. But none came. They stood bitterly isolated.The debate on the Motion of Confidence continued over two days. On the second day, Vajpayee tendered his resignation on the floor of the house, not waiting for the final vote that would have revealed how far off the mark the party was. Deve Gowda had already been waiting in the wings for the prime minister’s post. Sobhana K. Nair is a Deputy Editor with The Hindu, covering both politics and policy.