Election as looking glass

UTTAR Pradesh, more than any other state, defines India. For starters, it is decisive because of its sheer size and the fact that it accounts for approximately 16 per cent of the country’s population — in fact, it could be deemed the seventh largest country in the world in terms of its numbers.

It gives India its broadest swathe of Himalayan terrain and its most vital river system. It has put its stamp on how this country dresses, what it eats and how its speaks. It has given us all but two of our prime ministers. Above all, the two political phenomena of the nineties — the politics of Hindu nationalism and backward caste mobilisation, Mandir and Mandal — which decisively altered the contours of Indian politics, were played out here.

When such a significant state goes to the polls it has consequences not just for the people who reside there but the people of this country. And not just in terms of who gets to rule from Lucknow, or even Delhi, but in terms of India’s social and developmental profile. UP has the highest crude death rate, the highest total fertility rate, the lowest number of attended births, the highest maternal mortality rates, the highest under-five mortality rate.

Its per capita investment in health, water supply and sanitation is estimated at Rs 14, compared to the All-India average of Rs 29. Some 79 per cent of its people live in rural areas and 62.5 per cent of this population is made up of cultivators. Yet land distribution is highly skewed, with 72.6 per cent of landholders having patches of less than one hectare and whose holdings together account for only 28.29 per cent of the cultivated area.

The profile of the state’s economy is no different. UP, in fact, is in a financial black hole with a growth rate that is about half the national average and a GDP even lower than that of Orissa. In the 1950s, its per capita income was roughly equal to the all-India figure.

Today, it is half of it. In 1987-88, it was a revenue surplus state, 12 years later its revenue deficit stood at Rs 7,253 crore. Yet successive finance ministers in the state have firmly resisted the option of raising taxes and today its per capita tax revenue as a percentage of per capita income is the lowest of all states. UP thus subsists on a diet of borrowed funds and spends over Rs 5,000 crore, or 32 per cent of its revenue receipts, in debt servicing. To say then that it constitutes the largest pool of impoverishment in the country would be an understatement.

Elections are, of course, a time to take stock and plot change. But if the signals from the present campaign are anything to go by, no government that emerges out of the dust and tumult of these elections will change UP’s reality. There are several reasons for this. Take the ubiquitous presence of criminals in the fray. According to Election Commission sources, 965 candidates of the 5,533 contesting have police records — that is 17 per cent of the total.

The winnability factor seems to hinge on the criminality factor, with every major political party — even as it claims to be cleaner than the others — continuing to field a rich assortment of mafia dons, rapists, blackmailers, murderers and the like. This is one reserved quota that has steadily grown with every passing election, indicating the extent to which legitimate political space is giving way to the illegitimate.

If UP’s economy has been sustained on borrowings, its politics is sustained on promises and postures. Rajnath Singh’s desperate announcement of Rs 1,600 crore worth of pre-election sops is entirely in sync with this tradition. Even while accepting that the language of political campaigning is distinct from the language of governance — as they say, one campaigns in poetry and governs in prose — what is alarming nevertheless is that substance has yielded almost entirely to shibboleths.

The Bollywoodian dialogue that Rajnath Singh has now taken recourse to: Kis mai ke lal mein itna dum hai, kisne itna doodh piya hai ki hamara sar phod de? (which mother’s son has so much strength, has drunk so much milk as to break our head?); the Bachchan brand of blood donation camps that Mulayam Singh Yadav is banking upon; the fact that Vajpayee has to pretend to be Mahabharata’s Bhishma Pitamah to carry conviction with the crowds, speak of a breakdown in the dialogue between candidates and their constituencies, between political party and voter, that an election at its best is meant to be.

So conspicuous is the lack of popular expectations from elected representatives that a ‘time pass’ theatre has come to fill the gap. But the trouble with dabbling in the dramatic is that you constantly need to come up with new capers. In the 1993 assembly elections in UP the BJP, hoping to squeeze the last drop out of the Ayodhya lemon after the demolition, pulled out the Religion Bill as its focus and staged a 15-day Janadesh Yatra with the slogan ‘On to Ram Rajya’.

It only paved the way for the SP-BSP to come to power. Today, even the chief architect of UP’s Ram politics, L.K. Advani, studiously refrains from muttering the Ram mantra in campaign speeches, having realised that the same genie cannot be invoked twice.

It is this search for an alternative that forced the BJP to play the backward card this time. Rajnath Singh’s audacious move to institute quotas within quotas — which has now been put on hold thanks to a Supreme Court stay — was a master stroke.

Realising the divisions that had surfaced within the broad reservation quotas — the fact that it was the Jatavs and the Yadavs who have most benefited from the SC/ST and OBC reservations — Rajnath Singh decided to target those who occupied the lowest tier in the backward caste hierarchy. A social justice committee was set up in June last year. Within a month it had submitted its report, arguing for the need to rationalise reservations for ST/SCs and OBCs.

By mid-September, the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (Amendment) Ordinance 2001 was promulgated. The efficiency with which Rajnath Singh set about doing all this with the polls in mind is another instance of how political expediency, rather than a genuine desire to transform people’s lives, has come to drive UP politics.

There can be no denying that a state which has long been dominated by the numerically significant upper castes requires meaningful interventions to battle an age-old tyranny. But caste mobilisation for electoral success does not always translate into social change.

Mandal and Dalit politics in the state, whether it was a Mulayam Singh Yadav calling the shots or a Mayawati, has become just another way to appoint one’s own people in positions of power so as to control the state apparatus for personal ends.

It is India’s tragedy that a state which is home to an estimated one-fifth of its poor is held hostage to the ambitions of a cynical bunch of buccaneers. An election should normally signal hope for better times. This one only reflects UP’s dismal future.

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