UP is down is up

Uttar Pradesh gets a new government today but only the very daring or the very foolish will bet on it acquiring a new politics as well. There’s the usual spectacle of unlikely allies coming together only for a slice of power. In this round, the odd couples seem even odder than usual: Consider Kalyan Singh, tainted by the Babri demolition, sharing the cake with ‘Maulana’ Mulayam, without a trace of queasiness. Or Kalyan Singh with the Congress. Even, Mulayam with the Congress. And last but not least, the BJP with Mulayam — the secret pact between the two that allegedly paved the Samajwadi Party chief’s path to the throne after Mayawati’s rude break-up with the BJP has not exactly remained a secret. There are the messy leftovers that remain to be cleared even after a new government is seated at the high table: The 14 BSP MLAs in Mulayam’s List, for instance — will they be called ‘‘supporters’’ or ‘‘defectors’’? And then, the scandal of a new government of multiple hue being hustled through the swearing-in without having arrived at, nor having attempted to reach, anything resembling a ‘common minimum programme’.

It is tempting to respond to this latest UP moment with another lament. About strange bedfellows, the erosion of ideology, the mixing and mangling of terms like ‘‘social justice’’, ‘‘communalism’’, ‘‘secularism’’. It is tempting to raise tired fingers, once more, at the chronic sickness of politics in India’s most crucial state and sit back and wait for the next political logjam. But that seduction should be resisted. The fact is that in UP, single-party rule has been ruled out because the polity is irresistibly fragmented into narrow and narrower vote banks. The days of the tidy political field are long gone. Political promiscuity is endemic now in UP. But the loss of a linear political narrative must not necessarily mean the end of governance as well. What we have witnessed in UP over the last few years, is not just the mess of coalition politics, but the stink of bad coalition politics. We have seen alliances sown in party backrooms in New Delhi being forcibly transplanted on to hostile soil in Lucknow — it’s not just the BJP-BSP divorce that is acrimonious, remember, their coupling was always tormented as well. We have seen political partnerships and governments cobbled together on the basis of only a shared animus against another formation. We have seen politics in UP sink so deep into its own contradictions that it loses all sight of the people.

As a new government assumes charge in Lucknow, the nation hopes that it will fight the incoherence of its birth and give the people of the state a respite. And, dare we hope, some responsive governance?