: There is at least one thing for which a political journalist would love Uttar Pradesh: for nearly two decades now its voters have worked so consistently, and generously, to justify our caste-based punditry. Only acronyms have changed or morphed over these years — from AJGAR to MAJGAR to MY and so on — but essentially these theories have been built around various combinations of middle and backward castes and Muslims. If dalits have not really figured in these, it is because, with the rise of the BSP, they constitute a “combination” entirely their own. They vote as a large block, and whether their leader Mayawati is in power or in the opposition depends primarily on how many Muslim voters she manages to lure out of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tight embrace.
But this cosy, lazy and disastrous arrangement is now about to change. If Bihar showed us one thing last year, it was that there is a use-by date written on even the most durable electoral equation. That something happens at some of inflexion, when voters leave their caste trenches, climb down the battlements and ramparts of fortresses in which their “leaders” have trapped them for years. Then comes change. Or Nitish Kumar replaces Rabri Devi. But is Uttar Pradesh at that point of inflexion yet? Is its voter now wise — or impatient enough — to see how this ossified voting behaviour has sealed her and her children’s fate for nearly two decades? That it is time now to vote like her compatriots do in most other states, on past performance, on future promise and, most importantly, on present impatience. It all adds up to that lovely — and dreadful if you are the ruler — principle of anti-incumbency.
The last time we Limousine Liberals, a motley collection of journalists, TV anchors, business tycoons, psephologists, economists and bankers that often travels together to watch most major elections visited this state was also at the peak of summer, in the general elections of 2004. And, even though the geography we then covered was at the other end of the state, the landscape was rather similar. Land had just been harvested and bundles of a bountiful wheat crop lay neatly for as far as you could see. But similarities are only physical because there is change in the political landscape.
Shekhar Gupta
