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You can see its emerging contours in UP rallies: Leaders moving away from cliche, voters moving to the centre — politics of aspiration slowly edging out politics of grievance.

A street in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh (representational image) | Commons

My probably wishful theorising last week, that Uttar Pradesh, following Bihar and then Punjab, was now underlining a process in which the voter is moving to the centre, and away from the mandal-kamandal divide, may yet stand the test of time and the final election results in the state. But it did not stand the test of an hour spent at a BJP election rally in Dhampur, close to Bijnor in the state’s fertile western grain-bowl. Or at least not the first half of that hour.

While the rather modest crowd — but that is the norm these days for all parties — waits for party president Rajnath Singh, at the microphone is a scrawny rabble-rouser who, we later discover, is one Ashok Katariya, a Yuva Morcha worker who accounts for very little even in the local power structure. But he obviously “knows” exactly what is wrong with the place.

Hindu women are no longer safe here, nor is national interest. Centres of subversion and training run by the ISI are springing up everywhere. And why is that happening? Because the number of Muslims is going up. At last count, they had reached 41 per cent of the local population, and rising. Now we all know in the divided heartland politics everybody does his own census and nobody particularly wants to be confused by facts. So you can even overlook this as some kind of a mid-afternoon ploy on a 43-degree day to keep the crowds entertained. Until he gets to the real issue.

The Muslims, he says, slaughter cows. “Now, they can eat dogs, cats, horses, camels, elephants, snakes, or any living thing God and nature may have created,” he says with an air of superior disdain and disapproval. “But they should refrain from eating beef. Because the cow is our mother, and if somebody slaughters a cow, we will slaughter that b…..d.” Not only is this a bit much for the Limousine Liberals who are now campaign-hardened veterans of 11 elections, you also see some disapproving, embarrassed shakes of the head on the dais. But Rajnath Singh arrives soon enough to restore some degree of sanity.

His message is by no means a reflection of his party’s Nehruvian — ok, not even Gandhian — commitment. But you can see the desperation to move to the centre. Most of the abuse is reserved for Mulayam’s misrule, minorities are promised safe conduct even though there is no effort to seek their votes, and then some of his own party’s more divisive, emotional demands are painted in conciliatory colours. The issue of singing Vande Mataram, for example. Why communalise an issue on which Hindus and Muslims were united during the freedom movement, he asks, repeatedly invoking the name of martyr Ashfaqullah Khan, who “told his mother he would prefer to embrace the noose — of course while singing Vande Mataram — rather than submit to her entreaties to bring her the bahu she wanted so desperately.” Of course, the only other freedom fighter he talked about was Chandra Shekhar Azad and no prizes for guessing why. He is a Thakur, so is his candidate at Dhampur, and so was Azad. Trust the politics of Uttar Pradesh now to even divide the mostly leftist revolutionary streak of our movement also along communal and caste lines. But overall, Singh is searching for a justification for the BJP’s Hindu nationalism in the non-Congress part of the freedom movement and thereby a new definition of secularism. All this without once mentioning Savarkar.

The theme of Vande Mataram returns next day at Shahbad, may be a hundred kilometres away, at Mulayam Singh’s even smaller rally. Gone is his earlier pro-Muslim thunder. The message is now more conciliatory, of a move to some space in the centre, even though the lack of conviction echoes in his voice through the half-hour speech. Muslims are every bit as patriotic as the rest, he says, and the BJP casts aspersions on them over issues like Vande Mataram. Then, surprise of surprises (and you’d hope the Congress top brass is hearing this), he says Muslims were always happy to sing Vande Mataram, particularly during the freedom movement. It is only after the Jana Sangh began to politicise it, and made it a litmus tests for Muslims’ national loyalties, that they started to avoid the song. That was out of irritation. The freebies Mulayam now announces — higher education, cancer treatment even in foreign hospitals if necessary, unemployment doles — are now common to all faiths and castes.

And if you thought his rather more nuanced “secular” appeal now is just a cynical counter to the BJP’s effort to package Hindu nationalism as old fashioned patriotism, you see change elsewhere. In every political meeting you need a speaker to keep the crowds engaged till the leader arrives. Usually he is the rhetorician, the rabble-rouser and you can expect to hear from him all the terrible things that his party may believe in or intend to do, but that the senior leaders won’t say, the kind of rubbish that keeps crowds interested, particularly in a summer election at the peak of the harvest season. And what do you hear from the gent in Mulayam’s Shahbad rally? That his leader has governed the state so marvelously, it has notched up its highest FDI score ever. And the best is yet to come, billions and trillions will come from Japan, Europe, America, who all want to invest in Mulayam Singh’s state. Sure enough, Mulayam repeats the same dreaded three-letter word, FDI, in his speech as well. And then, perhaps sighting a few bankers and India’s most hawk-eyed free-market economist in our midst, goes to great lengths to explain how wonderfully he has managed the fisc, and how he could do it all without increasing his deficit.

All this goes on amidst a small sea of red Lohia caps. So here is my proposition. If the president of the BJP extols the virtues of a Muslim martyr, attacks the UPA on housing loan interest rates rise and if Lohiaites are talking FDI and fiscal discipline and Mulayam feels the need to underline Muslims are not opposed to singing Vande Mataram, but just irritated by the BJP’s insistence that they do so to prove their patriotism, where is the state’s politics moving? To the Left, Right, or the centre? Good argument, you might say, but add, even if you are my friend and take me seriously, that it is still a bit thin. Not quite Q.E.D. Not quite yet.

You do not look at Rahul Gandhi for any more evidence of that, because the Congress in any case has no option but to stay in the very middle of this political landscape, howsoever marginal its clout and prospects. We catch up with him in the Muslim heart of Muradabad where, until not so long ago, you found more BSF troops per capita than in Srinagar. The crowds, certainly bigger than any we have seen so far, wait for him, even break for the afternoon namaz as he is delayed, and come right back, a gentle flood of white caps as soon as the prayer is over. He talks of development, law and order, how the state has been left behind, how the rest of the country is moving on, how he intends to be here, work in Uttar Pradesh. He is not building on the theme of Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi. His audience is almost a hundred per cent Muslim, but his message has almost nothing that is minority-centric though, to be fair, Salman Khurshid who speaks before him, does bring in the promise of reservations for OBCs among Muslims, marring what is otherwise a wonderfully worded secular, nationalistic speech, peppered with references for the heartland’s syncretic “Ganga-Jamni” tradition. Rahul’s challenge is formidable: re-building a party where nothing of its past has survived — ideas, machinery, leaders, nothing. But he has realised too that the message that can now work is a promise for the future rather than a lament for the past.

You get a better idea why he, as well as his vastly more experienced rivals, are right in moving towards the centre when you check out the change in the countryside. In the oversized slum-village of Afzalgarh which boasts more than 50 tractors, four hours per day of power supply but three schools and a madarsa, we met three very young girls carrying bags of firewood — actually scrapings from the nearby saw-mill — larger than their tiny frames. Don’t ask them exactly how old they are. To me, they looked about the age of the three loveliest little creatures you see in the Hutch ad describing their dog in the classroom briefly, less briefly and even less briefly. Zeba, Aamna and Mantazar (who tells us she prefers to be addressed by her pet name, Chand), are cousins. Their fathers are tailors. They help their mothers in the kitchen, wash clothes and fetch water and firewood. But they all go to school — a private school, such as it may be in Afzalgarh. In the evenings, though, they also go to the madarsa. Your favourite subjects: English, Hindi, Urdu and, surprise of surprises, ganit (maths). A half hour spent with the three cousins of Afzalgarh as they put their loads down and chat away, would cure you of many misconceptions, stereotypes, old notions of Uttar Pradesh, of rural India, of Muslims, or Muslim women.

If you want to see change, come to Uttar Pradesh. Until the other day, if I said so, you’d ask me to go get my head examined. And I would perhaps have done so. But not now. There is change, and while it may take some time reflecting fully in election results, it is acquiring a momentum that will redefine our political landscape in a way that we move away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration.