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Ever since he picked a fight with Mulayam Singh Yadav and got himself expelled from the Samajwadi Party, Raj Babbar has been at a loose end. In parliamentary language, he’s an ‘unattached’ MP, that is, he doesn’t belong to any party. And that’s his problem. He’s bombed with the SP. The BSP hasn’t opened its doors for him. He’s left with a Hobson’s choice — to join the Congress or Ajit Singh’s RLD. Both are fading forces in his home state of UP so there isn’t much joy for him in either. Which is why this star of yesteryears is now trying to resurrect his film career. After a sabbatical of two years (his last movie was Corporate), Babbar has signed up to act in a film and he’s in talks for a couple more. It looks like he’s put his political career on pause mode for a bit. But what happens if there’s a snap poll as the political buzz suggests? Babbar is looking to his mentor, former Prime Minister VP Singh, for directions.
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At least Babbar can look for solace in Bollywood till his political fortunes pick up again. The other ex-SP Mulayam-baiter, Beni Prasad Verma, isn’t so lucky. A professional politician, he has nothing to fall back on in times of trouble. Like Babbar, this former union minister and Lok Sabha MP took on the SP chieftan just before the UP assembly elections earlier this year. He floated his own Samajwadi Kranti Dal, handed out tickets to SP rebels and contested himself on an SKD symbol.

In an election that squeezed out every other party except Mayawati’s BSP and Mulayam’s SP, Verma came a cropper and his party collapsed before takeoff. Since then, he’s been mooning around like a lost soul. Babbar is one of the few MPs who still greets him with respect and warmth, probably because he empathises with Verma’s plight. Verma doesn’t even have the safety net of being an unattached MP like Babbar.

Next week, he will have to resign from the Lok Sabha or suffer the consequences of incurring Mulayam’s wrath. The SP has moved the Election Commission to strip him of his parliament seat for daring to fight the assembly election on a rival ticket. The irony is that both Babbar and Verma were once Mulayam’s blue-eyed boys.
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While his former soldiers hunt for new battlegrounds, Mulayam himself is not sure what shape to give his politics. Political circles in UP are buzzing with talk about a thaw in Congress-SP relations. A quiet one-on-one meeting between Amar Singh and Pranab Mukherjee in the latter’s Parliament House office recently touched off speculation that the two bitter rivals have decided to bury the past and open a channel of communication. In these uncertain times, it makes better sense to have more friends than enemies.

TAILPIECE
CPI’s newest entrant to Rajya Sabha, D Raja, was in high dudgeon last week. One moment, he was happily marching with his comrades from Chennai to Visakhapatnam in protest against the US-led naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal. The next moment, he found himself being rushed back to Chennai to catch a flight to Delhi for the next day’s Rajya Sabha debate on the nuclear deal. He hurriedly scribbled points on the plane and got to Parliament in the nick of time, only to find that the House had been adjourned and the debate cancelled. Wasted effort, Raja was heard complaining to those who remarked on the scowl marring his placid face.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net