The other Yadav

Absent from Bihar polls: Ram and Jinnah, Muslims with job quotas and subsidised Urdu teachers. Strikingly present in Bihar polls: the lesson that you can win an election8212;even in the tirthsthan and Mecca of identity politics, the Hindi heartland8212;by campaigning on governance. Homework for the Big Two, the BJP and Congress, of the political class: apply the lesson to other areas, especially Uttar Pradesh.

With Bihar at least invested with the promise that development will replace social stratification as the state8217;s main official agenda, UP8212;the heartland8217;s other big state crying out for fresh political ideas8212;must benefit from some introspection on the part of the BJP and Congress. In UP, the BJP is bereft of ideas after successive electoral rebuttals of the thesis on the 8220;Hindu vote8221;. The Congress made rather grand noises about taking on Mulayam Singh Yadav on policy/development issues. Rahul Gandhi was to be the face of that campaign. But the party seems to have little to offer bar out-competing Mulayam on aggressive minorityism. Both the national parties are, in effect, giving Mulayam a free pass on political consolidation. This is not only not good for the two parties, it is not good for UP either. Along with Bihar, UP is a state where population growth8212;and attendant social deficiencies8212;and economic dynamism are on dangerously different trajectories.

It is true, of course, that the Indian voter does not exhibit linear behaviour. Development as a desideratum may always be present in voter calculations but it doesn8217;t always surface. Parties have seemingly goofed up in past elections by focusing on governance. After all, it can be argued that it took a long time to rid Bihar of the notion that development doesn8217;t matter. But that is partly explained by the wrong strategies the national parties followed in the state, which is precisely what they are doing in UP as well. The other Yadav in the Hindi heartland deserves a better political challenge.