The unravelling of Uttar Pradesh

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 BJP offers Hindu voters high-tech communal propaganda in a shameful CD that makes every Indian Muslim sound like a traitor. This CD was withdrawn when the Election Commission noticed that it was inciting communal hatred. But the party continued its hate campaign through advertisements that hinted that every Muslim was a Pakistani in his heart.

Then we have the two main contenders in the election, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s

Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, who offer the people of Uttar Pradesh only the politics of caste. How very sad for our largest and most populous state!

Uttar Pradesh has no business to be poor. It is poor because it has the misfortune of having a really dismal collection of politicians and political parties to choose from. Let me give you an example of what I mean when I say that poverty in India is the direct result of bad governance. A statistic that this column has mentioned before is that if we took the money we spend on poverty alleviation programmes annually and distributed it via money order among those who live below the poverty line, every family would get Rs 8,000 a month and automatically rise above the poverty line.

... contd.