Uttar Pradesh election
results which came out on May 11, 2007 seem to be pointing out some
significant political portents to India�s political parties and their
leaders.
On that day for the first time in fifteen years, the Uttar
Pradesh electorate gave a clear political mandate to a single political
party and thereby pre-empting political horse-trading and party
switching which had become a regular feature due to fragmented mandates
in earlier elections.
Uttar Pradesh, as
would be recalled contributes the largest number of Members of
Parliament to India�s Parliament and therefore is a politically
significant state with a strong bearing on India�s governance. Till
the British left it was the most progressive state and continued as
such for a few years more under its first two or three Chief
Ministers. The State thereafter progressively declined despite the
fact that it contributed five Prime Ministers of India including
three generations of the Nehru Gandhi political dynasty.
The decline could be attributed to a combination of a large number
of factors which plague most of India�s backward states but
particularly Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which constitute the bulk of
India�s Hindi-speaking heartland. Weak political leaders, corrupt
and caste-ridden political and administrative machinery coupled with
criminalization of politics and reliance on casteist and Indian
Muslim captive vote-banks distorted the electoral arithmetic and
paralyzed governance. The net result was fragmented mandates, hung
Assemblies and every politician was up for sale to the highest
bidder to destabilize existing governments.
Uttar Pradesh seems to have broken this evil spell of fifteen years
but it remains to be seen as to for how long this clear mandate can
last. At issue is whether the Bahujan Samaj Party ( BSP ) which has
been given a clear mandate can provide the good governance that the
people of Uttar Pradesh aspire for having been disgusted with what
has been served to them in the preceding decade and a half.
The BSP as the name signifies has been the political party
representing the Dalits (Mahatma Gandhi�s Harijans or India�s lower
castes). The BSP had a sizeable captive vote bank and though
Mayawati its leader had earlier been Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh
for three short spells it was only with opportunistic coalitions
with other political parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP)
etc and which dissolved as soon as they took shape. The BSP could
come into power this time as for the first time it went into a
political outreach to the upper caste Brahmins and the economically
weaker strata of the upper castes. They were also given a sizeable
number of seats to contest the elections on the BSP ticket.
This new social engineering sends out an important political message
that caste-based parties cannot on their own strength seize
political power. Perforce, they would have to be more politically
inclusive and embrace all economically weaker sections of people
irrespective of caste and creed. These election results indicate
that the Muslim-Yadav traditional vote-bank of the Samajwadi Party
(SP) of Mulayam Singh Yadav who has been voted out of power stands
trumped by the new combination of Dalit-Brahmin combination of
Mayawati
So powerful is this portent that even Mayawati after the election
results was prompted to declare that India�s reservation policies
need revision in that the traditional caste or class backwardness
criteria should be replaced by the criterion of economic
backwardness. Political pundits are already opining that this could
be Mayawati�s magic mantra which could in the future propel her to
power in New Delhi.
India�s two major political parties have fared very badly in Uttar
Pradesh and that is significant for it makes their political
fortunes in the 2009 General Elections that much more uncertain. It
reveals that despite a line-up of all-India stature political
leaders, their stature or political popularity could not carry them
far due to organizational weaknesses in both the Congress Party and
the BJP.
The Congress Party through Sonia Gandhi has acknowledged that in
Uttar Pradesh it stood stymied due to organizational weaknesses and
in-fighting. But this seems to be an afterthought and a cover-up as
both she and her son were frequently visiting the state for
political purposes and should have remedied these shortcomings in
the run-up to the elections. It also forcefully brings into focus
that Sonia Gandhi�s political power and that of the Dynasty is
declining. Sonia Gandhi herself is on record that while there was
popular enthusiasm for them, it did not get translated into votes
for the Congress
The BJP was hopeful to come into power with a better showing and in
coalition with some other political outfits. It was hoping a
sequential win here would add to its political clout after victories
in Punjab and Uttarkhand etc. It did not happen for virtually the
same reasons as the Congress. Former PM Vajpayee is no longer a star
attraction because oratory without the aura of political charisma
does not get translated into votes. Further, the BJP�s
organizational cadres in Uttar Pradesh have been weak and
demoralized by the Party�s central policies. It also seems that the
BJP did not have full support from the RSS cadres in the state. And
more importantly, a fair chunk of the economically weaker upper
class votes stood transferred to Mayawati�s BSP.
Of course, all these portents become effective and operational only
if Mayawati comes out with good and responsive governance, free of
corruption and stays the course without getting distracted by the
politics of political vendetta against her erstwhile political
opponents.
Notwithstanding the above, the people of Uttar Pradesh seem to have
sent out quite a few political portents, the chief of which being
that social engineering and development and reservation policies
solely directed at caste, class or Indian Muslim vote-banks as has
been the chief preoccupation of the so-called �secular� parties like
the Congress, the Leftists and the Congress�s OBC parties may now be
no longer all that valid in electoral arithmetic.
May 19,
2007
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