The you in UP

Voters in India's largest state may be coming out of their trenches. Celebrate, unless you are the politician who built those trenches.

An aerial view of a street in Lucknow | Representational image | Commons

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.

My jottings from May 2004, were mostly pessimistic (‘Seizure in the Heartland’, May 1, www.expressindia.com). The fundamental cause of despair was how Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were voting along caste combinations and thereby bucking the spectacular national wave of anti-incumbency. This frozen voting behaviour, I had then bemoaned, was responsible for the frozen nature of the heartland’s politics. This way, people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were allowing their leaders to take them for granted, because they could safely presume they wouldn’t lose if they didn’t perform and they wouldn’t win any bigger if they did. And people voted this way before because they had no real hope from anybody. If nobody is going to improve my bijli, sadak, paani, schools, hospitals and law and order anyway, then why should I bother to change anything? The least I can do is to keep my caste cousin in power. That was the despair of the summer of 2004.

I cannot yet tell you who will rule UP, come mid-May. All I can tell you is what anybody would tell you, quite safely, that the state is heading for a hung assembly. But I will stick my neck out this time and tell you that change is in the air. I also have a vested interest in making that claim — and wishing that it stands the test of these seven rounds of voting — because I need it as evidence for my new political theory. That the vote in India is now moving back towards the “centre” of our politics. That the post-1989 “aberration” — where the state not merely got divided but fractured into so many regional, sub-regional and caste-based parties — is now ending. That the use-by date on the AJGARs, the MAJGARs, the KHAMS, the MYs and so on is now getting over. We saw it in Bihar last year when most smaller parties and independents got wiped out, resulting in a clear NDA/UPA division. You saw it in Punjab this year, when the Congress lost despite improving its vote by five percentage points — because the Akali-BJP combine increased by 9 per cent. And where did these votes come from? They mostly came from “others” which declined from 24 to 11 per cent. These also included some significant others like the BSP and the Left. Independents losing out has been a growing trend for a decade now. The movement away from narrow-focus, caste or sub-regional politics is a new phenomenon altogether. If it grows, it can stitch back together a polity left in tatters by the mandir-masjid or mandal-kamandal politics.

But every political theory in India, particularly one that promises to redefine all our power equations, must survive the test of Uttar Pradesh.

It is a tough test because nothing has changed with the prejudices, hatred and insecurities which brought about this divided politics in the first place. Most Muslims you meet in the thickly-populated and prosperous western UP grain-bowl between the Jamuna and the Ganga and up to the fringes of Terai still fear the BJP. They will tell you, of course, that Muslims and Hindus are brothers, but if there is one thought they loathe, it is the BJP coming to power. So they will vote for whoever they think can defeat the BJP. That, therefore, is the static part of the state’s politics. But there is a difference now. They no longer see Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP as the only party capable of doing that. In places they think Mayawati’s upper caste candidate is more likely to defeat saffron; in some — though much fewer — places, they think the vote-split between SP, BSP and BJP may be such that the rejuvenating Congress may prevail if only the Muslims swing towards it. This is one of the reasons why, as NDTV’s exit polls predict, you will see the Congress vote share rising this time. It will not get close to the 20 per cent mark where votes start translating into seats rapidly, but it will rise sufficiently to give the party a new heart, to deny Mulayam and his SP a fresh term and to pull the state’s politics back towards the Centre.

My back-to-the-centre theory rests on two main postulates. One, that Congress and the BJP, together, must have at least 350 seats in Lok Sabha. That way, irrespective of which coalition is in power, our national politics would have a stable centre of gravity. Two, irrespective of who is in power in Uttar Pradesh, BJP and the Congress, together, must have at least 50 per cent of the vote. That ensures any coalition in Lucknow will have to include one of the two and that will ensure some degree of focus and stability and strengthen the prospects of anti-incumbency, thereby bringing our largest state firmly within the national political mainstream. This election won’t see the two national parties notch up that 50 per cent aggregate. But they will most likely cross 40, which, if you know Uttar Pradesh, is serious progress. More importantly, this is an idea, a political swing, that is only gathering momentum and looks irreversible in the near-term.