As someone who believes that India is a rich country that has been impoverished because of the incompetence of our political class, I have watched the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh with growing dismay. You only need to walk down a street in Mumbai or Delhi to see that poverty caused by bad governance is the only issue in Uttar Pradesh. Every other pavement hawker, beggar, derelict or homeless person you meet in the mean streets of our cities is from Uttar Pradesh. Vijay Kumar from Allahabad sells paan in Mumbai from a tiny pavement stall near the Vidhan Sabha. He makes around Rs 3,000 a month, of which he pays Rs 700 for the hovel he rents in a nearby shantytown. But he stays on in the city because its pavements offer him a better standard of living than his home state.

The same is true for Ajay Kumar from Gorakhpur, who makes about Rs 3,000 a month selling bananas from a basket that he moves from pavement to pavement when the municipality’s demolition men arrive. Even those of Uttar Pradesh’s citizens who do not live on the pavements of Mumbai and Delhi are worse off than the citizens of most other Indian states. But you would not know it from the issues that their political leaders have raised in this election campaign.

The Congress party’s crown prince, Rahul Gandhi, offers voters “secularism” in the form of a personal guarantee. “Had a member of my family been prime minister in 1992, the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished,” he told them proudly.

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