If you thought our politics was now driven by bijli sadak pani, hop into a car, switch gears, adjust your rear-view mirror — and hit a road in UP
Here’s a question for both, the pandit and the pollster. Or maybe it is just a truism suffixed with a convenient question mark: Could it be that election after election, the essential balance of power in our Parliament remains the same because in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, things also remain just the same?
Let’s simplify that. Why should people vote for somebody else, defying the pull and loyalties of caste and religion, when they don’t expect anybody to improve their lives? If my roads are going to remain the same, my power cuts forever 16 hours a day, no teachers in my schools or doctors in my primary health centres, and so on, why should I even bother to change anything? The least I can do — probably all I can do, the voter would say — is to keep my caste cousin in power. So the deadlock in Uttar Pradesh continues, an electorate split between Mulayam, Mayawati, BJP and Congress, almost in a constant pattern for nearly a decade. If electoral politics could be compared with wars, this is the very equivalent of the static trench-warfare of World War I, when for years nobody lost or gained any ground, but both sides lost life and limb by the millions. What a waste, military historians always say of that pointless war. Chances are, our political historians will say the same about our heartland politics in decades to come.
At one level, this deadlock is responsible for the frozen nature of our politics, hung Parliaments and frozen votebanks. These two states constitute nearly one-fourth of Lok Sabha. They defy the winds of change blowing elsewhere in India. Then, by the sheer force of their numbers, they also undo the welcome impact of that change. In most states — even in the neighbouring Hindi states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana — it is nearly impossible for an incumbent to get re-elected because nobody can come up to the expectations of a very demanding electorate. Not in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and as a consequence the people of these states have lost their national clout. Their politicians can afford to take their vote for granted. It won’t go down if they don’t perform, it won’t go up if they do. So give the people what they deserve: Sheer contempt, which is so evident in the manner the campaign is being run in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has just one agenda, split the Muslim vote between the SP, BSP and the Congress so it can get at least 30 seats. Mulayam just wants 25, Mayawati even less, maybe 20, so each can emerge as a kingmaker in mid-May, and the Congress has no idea other than driving poor Sonia and her children from one place to another hoping that some sparks of nostalgia would emerge, some Muslim vote will shift. Nobody has an idea for Uttar Pradesh. Nobody even has a promise.
If you want to see how it works in real life, come to this countryside. If you too were spoilt by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi last winter into believing that our politics
was moving into a bijli-sadak-paani-performance-accountability mode, be prepared to shift gears, readjust the rear-view mirror, change perspective, and certainly not for the better.
If you lived anywhere along the 65-km road (or what passes for it) linking the towns of Bewar and Etawah, linking Mulayam Singh Yadav’s constituency (Mainpuri) with his son Akhilesh’s (Kannauj), you couldn’t care less about any claims or promises. I am sure there are several other parts of the country where you could go for a similar reality check, but this one is perhaps the most rattlingly apt. It is so close to Delhi (just around 300 km), runs across Uttar Pradesh’s political heartland — Mayawati has sometimes contested from Akbarpur, not far from here, and the “road” in question links two major national highways, 1 and 2.
God knows I have travelled rough roads in my reporting years but it is difficult to recall one that was so consistently bad for such a long distance. Maybe a dirt track I once travelled linking Mizoram’s capital Aizawl with the then chief minister’s constituency of Saitual. But this was in the mountains, the year was 1981 and there was an insurgency on, so you couldn’t build many roads anyway. Or, more likely, the road from the airbase to the city of Herat in Najibullah’s Afghanistan, cratered by mines and the rest of the asphalt ripped out by the tracks of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, the only mode of transport available — and considered prudent. But there was a war on, and the road was just about 20 km. This is a 65-km minefield.
The land is fertile, as it should be in the 100-km expanse between the Ganga and the Jamuna. The crop has been plentiful, going by the neatly laid out bundles of recently harvested wheat. Even in the villages, ironically, you do not see any stark poverty. Most houses are pucca, there are motorcycles, the odd tractor, some hand-pumps, a flock of the most serene sarus cranes by the side of a pond. People are reasonably well clothed, though not always busy. What is non-existent is infrastructure and basic amenities. Schools look more decrepit than houses, government offices, strung along the road, so run down you wonder if anybody ever visits them. Just a mile short of the midway point, the over-grown village of Kishni — where traffic is blocked because the local thug wouldn’t let a truck pass without paying him his tribute — you see the animal husbandry department’s artificial insemination centre, filled with cobwebs and rubbish.You wonder if any buffalo ever got impregnated there and if one did, it must be a great, great, great, great, great grandmother, by now.
If the people still do not look so poor it is probably because so many of the men have joined the armed forces, or left for Delhi and elsewhere, driving our cars as chauffeurs, carrying our mail or fetching our tea as peons and desultorily patrolling our streets, sitting listlessly on stools and chairs at our gates forced into those silly uniforms of private security agencies. They have left their families to the care of the state which is non-existent. In one of those great ironies truly in the “this happens only in India” genre, in the rotting little town of Basrehar, just 20 km or so short of Etawah, you find, crying out for attention out of a mandi of jaggery which is more like a free, open-air feast for the flies, a textile shop. Take a peep and you see the signboard: Reid and Taylor suitings. Now you know what I am talking about.
If this patch of land has been the fount of political power in a state as powerful as Uttar Pradesh for so long, how come nobody has ever done anything for its inhabitants? And how come nobody ever seems to get punished for this by the voters? The answer lies in how successfully these caste-based leaders have been able to run such devilishly distorted politics. You impoverish your voters, increase their misery but then somehow convince them that someone else is to blame for this, probably from a rival caste. So each time, you ask for votes not for what you have done by way of benefiting your people but for what your enemies are perceived to have done to harm them.
We get an idea of how such negative politics is run in Bharat Hotel — my co-traveller and Businessweek’s India correspondent Manjit Kripalani notes with great delight that you can rent dorms here for 50 cents a night — in Kannauj. Obviously this is the kind of hotel the Samajwadi Party can afford to run its local office from and if there are bats hanging from the ceilings of the toilets, when did such things scare the Lohiaites? But what is truly scary is the mythology they are peddling. Among several pamphlets handed out to us is one, written in pretty good English, by Kalyan Jain, a former MP.
It is not just an indictment of “feel-good” but of the very idea of economic reform. The most telling is the section on the national highway programme. It is good to build roads, it says, thank you. But roads should be built to link villages with cities. Not these great highways that run across the country. Because they do not benefit people. They only make it easier for foreigners to take away our businesses and wealth. Alright, Mr Jain, let’s concede your point for a moment, for Lohiaites are to be allowed some intellectual leeway. But then why don’t you, for starters, at least get your leader and his son to build a real road linking their own constituencies? Another hour up the same road, at what looks like a neo-green revolution town with the unlikely name of Chabrimau, you find another Mulayam/ Akhilesh meeting inside an empty cold-storage so big it reminds you of the humongous puja pandals in the string of temples at Chhatarpur in Delhi’s outskirts. The leaders are late, as usual, and the crowd (strikingly unusual in not having a single woman, now you know why Mulayam so opposes the women’s reservation bill) is being entertained by the local bard. His singing is disastrous, tabla so out of tune and sync it would give Ustad Zakir Hussain a heart attack if he was within a hundred miles, but the message is clear. Mulayam stands by you Muslims (against the BJP) and the poor (against the privileged elites). The only encouraging note is the repeated exhortation to send your children to school. So maybe all is not lost yet. But by now you may be cynical enough to ask, but where are the schools?
Static politics affords its practitioners the luxury of not even having to invent fresh lies. You can repeat the same ones election after election and leave the rest to your own voters’ lack of options. If Mulayam, Mayawati and Laloo have been able to run this politics so successfully for more than a decade while their voters have fallen further behind the rest of their countrymen, they also have to thank our national parties’ lack of imagination.
You feel the Gandhi effect the moment you enter the family enclave of Amethi-Sultanpur-Rai Bareli. The roads are better (relatively speaking), there are health centres and schools seem functional even if Priyanka Gandhi tells you depressing stories of dropout rates and abysmal teaching standards, you even see a homoeopathic veterinary clinic run by the government (I certainly didn’t see any Jersey cows there). Priyanka would also tell you with great candour of the struggles she and the family have waged to raise funds for this region, of how much haemorrhages between the treasury and the people. But some of it has gone into the land and its people and they pay back by voting for the family, again and again. But the Congress is guilty of being satisfied with just that, and showing a complete inability or inclination to take the battle to the rest of the state. It has no message, no leader and no idea with the spark, appeal or charm, to cut across the caste-religion deadlock in this static battleground.
And where did the BJP lose its plot? You stop some place on the alleged road between Bewar and Etawah and ask a villager if he is feeling good and he will tell you to get lost, or worse, and in more colourful language. Under a 45-degree sun, with no water, electricity, money in the pocket, a job to keep him busy, nothing irritates him more than the idea of “feel good”. His fate is not worse than before, but it is not great. His India is not shining. That is why the loudest cheers at election rallies come when speakers mock the feel-good slogan: deal-good, steal-good, kneel-good (before Americans) and so on. Not all claims the BJP makes are wrong but they don’t work here. You can build the multiplexes, the malls, give cheaper housing loans, easy gas connections but in the great unwashed hinterland where real political power lies, nobody has seen these things yet.
But surely, you may ask, politicians have won elections on false slogans. So why can’t the BJP do it this time? Perhaps they made the one fatal error all vote-seeking political parties must avoid, of pegging an election campaign on the present. The problem with the present is, it is here and tangible, you say, I have made India shine and people say, show me how. My roads are rotten, my schools are deserted, I have no water, power, money, jobs, my life sucks. But if you had told him I will make your India shine it may have worked differently. In electoral politics you either sell a promise for the future, or nostalgia for the past. Offering the present for the voters’ scrutiny is dangerous business. Particularly so when they may still be living along roads like the one linking Bewar and Etawah.