Last week, as the squalid political soap opera that was the collapse of the Mayawati government played itself out wearily on our television screens did you notice how much Indian politics has changed? As I watched the endless stream of semi-literate, semi-articulate political players strut across my television screen I found myself fascinated and impressed by the extent of social change. There was a time when our largest, most populous state was ruled only by upper caste chief ministers who spoke refined Hindi and affected elegant manners but, in effect, did little else. The rot in Uttar Pradesh began a long time ago, unnoticed because it happened discreetly, but if you had gone to school in that state as I have you may have noticed it in the way lovely towns with orderly cantonments and elegant old buildings slowly disappeared under a degraded, new system of urban development that was contemptuous of planning. Dehra Dun, Mussoorie, Lucknow, Agra, Varanasi, the list is a long one. They have all crumbled beneath the crushing combination of unplanned development and a disdain for aesthetics. This happened to UP long before Mulayam Singh Yadav appeared in the early nineties. He merely accelerated the process especially in Lucknow. Rural parts of the state fared no better. Last week I spent a day in a village, near Bulandshahr, in which people lived much as they must have done when the British left. Television had brought a whiff of the 21st century, mostly via Doordarshan, but living standards were execrable. Not so much due to poverty as ignorance and medieval concepts of hygiene. Things would have been different if literacy had penetrated to the zenana but in this largely Muslim village, I could not find a single educated women. Images of naked children covered in filth, flies and sores float before my eyes, even as I write, and this is a village barely two hours from Delhi. The tragedy of UP is that it has had more governments (nobody can remember one that lasted full term) than it needs and a total absence of governance. It is my view that it was because the upper castes provided such incompetent, ineffectual governance that we have seen the rise of political leaders who speak illiterate Hindi and whose absence of anything resembling real education is scary. In this caboodle I count the lot. Mulayam, Mayawati, Kalyan Singh, Rajnath Singh and all those other forgettable creatures who had so much to say about ‘principles’ and ‘governance’ last week in such excruciatingly uneducated Hindi that I found myself wondering if any of them had ever read a book in any language. Since this column has no aspirations to political correctness let me spell out exactly what I am trying to say. Governance is such a complicated business that even highly educated, sophisticated, intelligent people can make terrible mistakes. It is not something that semi-literate and semi-articulate can handle so we have a situation in our largest state in which all that is left is politics. Politics and a scramble for power so shameless that it made an Aaj Tak anchor laugh outright when Amar Singh said that his party (Samajwadi) was not interested in power. But, hold the laughter a moment and you might see signs of hope in the terrible mess that governance has been reduced to in the state that has given us more prime ministers than any other. Hope comes not just from visible social change — power has shifted into the hands of people who would have found it hard to win a panchayat election in the old, Brahminical times — but also because the simple ways of the new ruling elite make it easier for ordinary people to see through the cant, through words like siddhant and sewa. This is just as good that corruption has become so unashamed that it has become easy to spot. So, some day soon Mayawati could find herself indicted for nearly allowing the destruction of the Taj Mahal for personal pecuniary gain.Much better undisguised corruption, though, than Rolex watches and Mont Blanc pens hidden under khadi. There is not much to commend in Mayawati’s second term as chief minister but at least we can say she was honest enough not to hide her diamonds or silks or that she liked celebrating her birthday in the brash, new style of the state’s brash new politicians.Will the third coming of Mulayam make a difference? Well, let us hope that he will at least stop the Taj Mahal from being turned into a shopping mall. What else? Not a lot really. A bit more hypocrisy about socialism and secularism and a change of emphasis from Dalits to Yadavs and other backwards.May I end by starting with unabashed political incorrectness that governance is not something that should be left in the hands of those who get it for reasons of caste. Governance will only come when relatively educated people with some understanding of modern realities get to the top. Swapping Mayawati for Mulayam is a movie we have all seen before. But the change does make the next general election a lot more interesting. The BJP, whether it admits or not, was counting on riding in on Mayawati’s back and now that this plan has fallen through its future looks bleak. It does not look bright for Congress either since its role as Mulayam’s handmaiden is unlikely to make a deep impression on voters. Back to politics, then, and more politics, and all UP wants is governance. Write to the author at tavleensingh@expressindia.com
