The Battle for UP

But if that makes India’s most populous state a psephologist’s nightmare, it can also be a political observer’s delight. For UP, despite all the bad press it gets, is a place where politics is inextricably mixed with the plasma that runs through its people’s bloodstream.

The much-reviled ‘‘Ulta Pradesh’’ that lies at the heart of the great Indo-Gangetic plain is politically crucial not just because it sends the largest number of MPs to the Lok Sabha but because its residents — be they learned Kashi pandits, semi-literate Agra maulvis, unlettered peasants in a faceless village or jobless youth hanging around the chai shop in one of those innumerable kasbas — have a more canny understanding of politics than most ‘‘analysts’’ who pontificate in print and on television in Mumbai and Delhi.

That the road to Delhi must pass through Lucknow, that whoever wins UP gets to rule the Centre has become an overused — if not entirely accurate — cliche. After all, in 1991 and 1996 the BJP won the giant’s share of UP seats but could not form a lasting government in Delhi. Conversely, it won only 29 seats — of 85 in the then undivided, pre-Uttaranchal, state — in 1999 but still managed to complete a full term at the Centre.

Yet the pre-eminent position of UP in India’s political landscape cannot be denied. And its importance lies not in electoral statistics but in political alchemy. Whether it was Charan Singh’s revolt in 1967 that heralded the rise of the backward castes or the politics of Mandir and Mandal that transformed north Indian politics, UP remains the best place for political trend-spotting.

So forget the numbers — each of the four main contenders is looking at a 15-25 seat range, give or take a few — and focus on the trends.

For the Congress, it’s goodwill rising

AS the election campaign peaks, three visible currents and an invisible undercurrent make up the big picture in Uttar Pradesh. The most significant trend is the revival of the Congress in a state where all but its last rites had been concluded.

The Grand Old Party, long synonymous with UP, was reduced to zero in 1998. In 1999, its tally of nine — reduced to eight when it failed to win the Shahjahanpur byelection after Jitendra Prasad’s death — did not spell a revival.

Over the past five years, UPCC chiefs have been changed every season but that has made little difference to a decrepit party structure. When elections were announced, the Congress high command tried desperately to sew an alliance, wooing the BSP and SP by turn and failing to get either.

The common refrain at 24 Akbar Road, the Congress’ HQ in the capital, was the party was doomed. Without an ally it didn’t stand a chance in UP, and without a revival in UP, it wouldn’t be in sniffing distance of Delhi.

The Congress revival in UP — not in terms of seats or even vote share but goodwill — has taken place despite the party. Well before the poll campaign got underway, reporters travelling through the state were taken aback by how often people mentioned the ‘‘good old days’’ under the shade of the Congress umbrella.

It was first dismissed as sentimental nostalgia. But as the campaign picked up and Rahul Gandhi entered the fray, the pro-Congress mood slowly moved from nostalgia to hope.

But outside the Amethi-Rae Bareli-Sultanpur triangle, the Congress did nothing about it. It was only on the final two days before campaigning ended for the first phase (April 26) in the state that Rahul made a whistle-stop tour through parts of eastern UP. And wherever he went, the Congress candidate was suddenly in the reckoning.

Big challenge for the little Gandhis

HAVING learnt a lesson, albeit belatedly, the Gandhis are now planning to campaign in a lot more seats that go to polls on May 5 and 10. But that may not help.

The party botched up in the selection of candidates; in many seats the announcement was held up till the last minute. And the Congress organisation remains riven with dissension and lassitude brought on by long years out of office.

The average ‘‘Congress worker’’ gets galvanised by the thought of power, not struggle. And with exit polls hinting at a far rosier picture than they had hoped for, the organisation too is showing signs of picking up. But it is by far too little, too late.

What is does mean, though, is that the Congress is no longer a has-been in UP. Its real battle will be the assembly election that is likely to be held far before the scheduled 2007, and then of course the next Lok Sabha election.

No ‘feel good’ in the Ayodhya backlash
THE second current, anti-current if you will, is the BJP’s complete disconnect with the aam janata of UP. For a party that prides itself on its grassroots organisation, the BJP has miserably failed in convincing the people of its new avatar and new message.

It is difficult to find a single person in UP who is moved by the party’s ‘‘feel good’’ campaign. The phrase provokes anger in some, resigned amusement in others.

They invariably point to the quotidian miseries of their lives — the absence of not just bijli, sadak, paani (BSP) but also TNT: taleem, naukri, tarakki (education, jobs, progress).

As for the ‘‘Atal wave’’, most people mention him approvingly but only when asked. But in constituency after constituency, it is the local MP who matters more than the distant PM.

The BJP has also suffered for sending out mixed messages. No one talks of the Ram mandir anymore but the party’s failure to deliver on the one issue on which it rode to power has led to a great loss in credibility.

Outside the Krishna Janmasthan in Mathura, shopkeeper Girdhari Lal Gautam rails against the party for whipping up the ‘‘mandir-masjid masla’’, the unresolved status of which has had a ripple effect in Mathura and on his business. Erstwhile BJP supporters in Allahabad say the party used Ayodhya only to get power and then promptly forgot all about it.

What has damaged the party’s image most is its poll-eve sops to Muslims. For a party that built its Hindu vote bank by attacking ‘‘Muslim appeasement’’ by ‘‘pseudo-secularists’’, this move is seen as utterly cynical by Muslims and Hindus alike.

A few Muslim leaders have expressed support for the BJP but their brethren dismiss them as avsarvadis (opportunists). A group of Muslims in Siddhauli near Sitapur, for instance, mockingly say, ‘‘If we had got crores of rupees, we too would have been singing praises of the BJP.’’

BJP: full throttle on an empty tank

BUT if the Congress lacks an organisation to translate goodwill into votes, the BJP still has the capacity to extract victories despite voter indifference, bordering on hostility.

It has requisitioned the services of all its first, second, and third rung leaders, stars and starlets from Bollywood, and the entire saffron brotherhood.

The panic in the BJP can be gauged from the way it has stepped up its campaign in Lucknow. Scores of BJP leaders and ‘‘samarthaks’’ are holding meetings in Lucknow every day and Atal Behari Vajpayee himself has despatched letters to the city’s denizens listing all the projects he has sanctioned as MP.

The high-pitch campaign apart, the BJP think tank has systematically sought to divide the Muslim vote with party leaders doling out certifcates to Mulayam Singh Yadav, only to damage his credibility among Muslims. In the end though, even if the BJP manages to retain its tally in UP, the party’s claim of being a party with a difference has taken a beating.

Socialite tune to socialist song
THE third trend the election has thrown up is the beginning of Mulayam’s decline. He may still win more seats than the other parties, but no longer enjoys the status he once did.

Wary Muslims say they are giving him a ‘‘last chance’’. If he does end up allying with the BJP, he can no longer take their support for granted in the assembly polls.

It is not Muslims alone who have lost their devotion to him. Samajwadi Party workers who belong to the old socialist school privately complain that ‘‘Netaji’’ has changed since falling into the clutches of Amar Singh.

Lucknow is full of anecdotes of the simmering differences between Amar Singh and Mulayam’s son Akhilesh; of how Bombay industrialists have taken over the party of ‘‘mazdoors and kisans’’; and of how even the ever-loyal Yadavs are beginning to have misgivings over the ascendancy of Thakurs in the party.

Watch it. This Maya is just no illusion

AND the invisible undercurrent? The magic of Mayawati. The BSP has been unusually low-key throughout the election campaign. Mayawati herself has been far less combative or controversial. But everywhere you go, people — most of them non-BSP supporters — will tell you ‘‘haathi ka vote to set hain’’ (BSP has a fixed vote) and it is therefore a formidable kona in the trikoni ladai (three-cornered contest).

The BSP has been particularly adroit in its choice of candidates. In Agra and Bahraich, for instance, the BSP’s Brahmin candidates are expected to get a chunk of the caste’s votes even though upper castes are otherwise suspicious of ‘‘Behenji’’ (Mayawati).

And while Muslims and the upper castes are veering to the Congress in seats where the party is in the fight, the Dalits remain largely loyal to the BSP. How it fares will have an important bearing in the post-election games in Delhi.

At the heart of the Muslim mind

Varghese K. George

THE morning after an unexpected summer rain that cooled Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Shakir, 85, was reading an Urdu newspaper advertisement by Mulayam Singh Yadav. ‘‘We don’t consider Muslims a vote bank,’’ Mulayam beamed defensively from the paper. The accompanying text detailed Mulayam’s services to the Muslim community, ‘‘which were not done for votes’’. Mulayam can be sure he won’t get as many as last time.

The Muslims Mind in UP is more diverse than ever: largely favouring ghar vapasi to the Congress, partly engaged in a germinal debate about backward and Dalit Muslims, for whom pan-Muslim concerns are less appealing. One thread that binds almost all Muslim minds is their feeling for their failed messiah.

Shakir turns away from Mulayam’s picture and pretends he hasn’t heard the question. Which was: will he vote Mulayam again?

He smiles the ‘‘you know it anyway’’ smile. A small crowd of Muslim weavers gather outside Shakir’s shop in the Old City area, with its 100,000 population. More and more of them are being displaced, every passing month.

Shakir’s son chips in: ‘‘Let me answer. The vote this time is for the Congress.’’ He is aware of the risks; he might help a BJP victory.

‘‘We can’t care less,’’ he says, ‘‘they will win next time perhaps. Congress has to come back and it will come back.’’

The wall of silence broken, the second and then the third man speak. Then it becomes a chorus. ‘‘We may vote BJP, but not Mulayam … Why vote indirectly for the BJP … He has taken us for granted …’’ And hold your breath: ‘‘He has been instrumental in increasing the Hindu-Muslim divide.’’

Mulayam is facing an unprecedented Muslim ire. Take his announcement of a school holiday for Friday prayers. The order was later revoked but it still has the community fuming.

‘‘Who asked for it?’’ wonders Naimuddin Chaudhary in Gorakhpur. ‘‘Woh Mussalmano ko bewakoof banana chahta tha (He wanted to fool Muslims),’’ says Mohammed Hashim Ansari, the original plaintiff in the Babri Masjid title suit in Ayodhya and till recently a committed Mulayam supporter.

Muslims in Uttar Pradesh are engaged in an informed political debate, wiser after the turmoil of the 1990s. They are keen to get rid of stereotypes, including that of the ‘‘Muslim Mind’’.

At the core of this phenomenon is the increasing restlessness among the backward-Dalit Muslims. ‘‘The debate around universal Muslim concerns such as Ayodhya or the uniform civil code has camouflaged the real bread and butter concerns of poor Muslims,’’ says Haji Nissar Ansari in Mau district. Ansari is an organiser of the All India Parsmanda Muslim Mahaj, fast spreading in UP and Bihar.

‘‘Secularism has been a tactic for Mulayam,’’ says Ali Anwar, convener of the Mahaj. ‘‘If Mulayam talks about the welfare of weavers rather than Muslims,’’ says Ansari, ‘‘it will help the poor Muslims. It will help the poor Hindus too because 30 per cent of the weavers are Hindus.’’

They have more talking points: that all but one of 31 Muslim MPs in the dissolved Lok Sabha were upper caste, that in the Ghosi constituency in eastern UP — it has almost 300,000 Muslim voters — Mulayam did not consider a Muslim candidate because he took the community’s vote as a given.

Amroha, in western UP, and Ali Hassan Ansari of the BSP offer the only case of a major party giving a backward Muslim a seat it is defending. In 1999, Rashid Alvi won Amroha for the BSP. Now Jamat Ulema-e-Hind general secretary Syed Mahmood Madani is contesting from Amroha on a Rakshtriya Lok Dal ticket, with SP support, to jeopardise the BSP’s chances.

There is a strong though scattered feeling in the community that the political elites — largely constituted by the upper caste Syed, Sheikhs, Pathan and Malliks — have used the Muslim identity for their own advance.

And this feeling makes Imam Bukhari’s fatwa and Arif Mohammed Khan’s possible victory in Kaiserganj only minute steps in the BJP’s ‘‘woo Muslim’’ strategy. The BJP is a party that only a power elite, which moves with the wind, would prefer, at least in the near future.

Also, the diktats of organisations such as the Milli Council, which gave directions to Muslims on which party to vote for in a constituency, are losing their grip.

This leaves Muslims with two realistic political options: the BSP and the Congress. Mayawati is conscious of the possibility of an alliance between Hindu and Muslim Dalits and Muslim backwards, comprising Ansaris, Rains, Dhunias, Dhaphalis, Qureshis, Dhobis.

The BSP has more Muslim candidates than any party in UP. As a result, her earlier alliances with the BJP notwithstanding, Muslims may look at Mayawati favourably.

But the Congress remains the first choice. ‘‘We used to be afraid of arguing for the Congress, now the situation has changed dramatically,’’ says Rashid Ansari, lawyer in Gorakhpur.What works in the Congress’ favour is the belief it is the only party that cannot think of joining hands with the BJP. There is a realisation that Congress-style moderation served the community better than the militant advocacy of a Mulayam or even a Mayawati.

But the Congress is far from prepared. Aziz Ahmad, a former Congressman, wanted to return to the party but was unsure. ‘‘The same people who caused the party’s debacle run it. We have no access to them. Even the party president is controlled by them,’’ Ahmad says. He finally joined the BSP and his wife is the candidate from Maharajganj, eastern UP.

Yet as more and more ordinary Muslims find voices independent of the small crowd that hitherto ran Muslim politics, UP will is set for a new churning in Hindu-Muslims relations, and caste relations within both communities. For the heartland’s Muslims, it’s time for social engineering.