All is illusion in UP

They say the Mayawati government still exists. But, they may as well add, only on paper. On the floor of the House, by most accounts, its numbers have already dipped below the 202-majority mark. A large enough number of rebel BJP MLAs has been seen to queue up at the UP Raj Bhavan for an audience with Governor Vishnukant Shastri over the last few days, ostensibly to declare their withdrawal of support to the BSP-BJP government. Though these brave men shout it out loud, they won’t write it down, lest they invite action under the anti-defection law. So the Mayawati government continues to exist. So long as the rebels refuse to write what they speak. So long as the governor does not take note of the obvious goings-on and ask the chief minister to prove her majority. So long as Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Sonia Gandhi’s Congress don’t get their act together. Will something give, or will the BJP’s New Delhi-to-Lucknow peace missions succeed at last in patching up the gaping holes in the coalition — is the all-important question. All eyes are sure to be on the UP farce in the coming days.

So what went wrong? Why is it that the ruling alliance in the country’s politically most significant state totters along only by default? How did things come to such a sorry pass that, in the final reckoning, the BJP can probably count more on a governor from-the-RSS-stables and a partyman-as- speaker than the party MLAs? These questions need to be asked over and over again so that we can hope to arrive at some answers by the time this round of the instability game is over and it is declared business-as-usual again. At the most obvious level, it is the overweening greed and ambition of the MLAs — each one wants to be minister. But it also has to do with the bad faith stitched into an alliance that was sewn up by party strategists rather than leaders, for reasons that have to do more with coming to power than delivering a government.

The mess in UP also raises a larger question. Could it be that the state has arrived at a three-pronged unbreakable impasse? Will parties ever learn to share power here or could it be that the answer lies in something more drastic? Like carving up the state into smaller, more coherent units in which majorities are not quite so hard to achieve? The answers elude UP, as usual.