UP polls may not be national bellwether

There is the general myth that Uttar Pradesh is the cockpit of Indian politics, and whoever wins the state will rule India. Through the 1990s and until the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it did not matter who won or lost the elections in UP. The state ceased to be the big player it fancied itself to be. Even when Atal Behari Vajpayee won from Lucknow and led a BJP-NDA government at the Centre, UP remained one of the many players in the power game, and it was not a key one. It was only when the BJP won 73 of 80 Lok Sabha seats, when two outsiders, BJP president Amit Shah and prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, wrought a miracle of sorts and made a clean sweep of the state’s largest Lok Sabha contingent, that the old adage of the winner in UP ruling India revived, though not fully.

The BJP hopes to ride on the crest of its 2014 Lok Sabha victory to win the coming seven-phase Assembly election, from February 11 to March 8. The Opposition seems to be in a disarray. The ruling Samajwadi Party is in a disintegrative mode. The other major local party, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party, is hoping to seize the reins of power as it had done in 2007. The 2007 and 2012 Assembly elections showed that the people of the state voted decisively for one or other of two major local players. The ostensible national parties, BJP and Congress, have been relegated to the margins. The Congress was last in power in the 1980s.

The BJP’s tenure in power has been patchy through the 1990s, except in 1991 when the Babri Masjid was demolished and the Kalyan Singh government resigned and was subsequently dismissed. The BJP lost the election that followed. UP then lost its political sheen because no one party seemed to represent the state in the state and at the Centre. The decline of the state in national politics was complete. What is left of the big stakes in state politics is who would win in the Assembly elections. It is as good or as interesting as to who would win the Assembly elections in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu or Rajasthan.

The unending baroque family drama of the Mulayam Singh Yadav clan in the SP signifies the roil and turmoil that marks the politics of the most populous state in the country. The battle between Mulayam Singh Yadav, the SP’s progenitor, and his chosen successor and incumbent chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, has undertones and overtones that mark the intrigues of any Asian family. The rivalries, factions, clashes are much too intertwined for anyone to unravel them and make sense of them.

Mulayam Singh Yadav chose his son Akhilesh as chief minister much against opposition from party elders, including his brother Shivpal Yadav, and even party veteran Azam Khan. For five years, Akhilesh was hemmed in on all sides from functioning properly as chief minister. There have been times when Mulayam Singh would chide his CM son. It would have been an interesting political satire but for the fact that it is for real. Akhilesh wants to fend off not just his uncle, Shivpal, his father’s confidant Amar Singh, but also his step-sister-in-law Aparna Yadav. It cannot get more complicated.

In the last few months, the internal feuding has intensified with Akhilesh removing Shivpal from the Cabinet and then reinstalling him, Mulayam Singh throwing out Akhilesh’s men from the party and then relenting, Mulayam Singh appointing Shivpal as party in-charge in the state, Akhilesh holding his own party conference and declaring himself the president of the party in the state, and then going back to the father to negotiate a settlement. To call this a political soap-opera would be unjust because the fight is for real, and each one of them is fighting a life-and-death political battle.

However riveting the palace intrigues of the SP, the silent march of the BSP, and the vainglorious attempts by the BJP to ride to power in Lucknow and the pathetic bid by the Congress to retain its toehold in the state, there is not much doubt that UP is still far from retaining its prominence in national politics. If the BJP wins, and it has to do so convincingly and with substantial numbers as it did in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the political fortunes of who reigns supreme in Lucknow would remain a matter of provincial importance. It will indeed be different if the BJP wins because it could then tilt the balance in favour of its own presidential nominee; the presidential election is due in July. But if no single party gets an overwhelming majority, then UP legislators’ vote — the electoral college which chooses the President comprises the legislators from all states and members of the two Houses of Parliament — will be as crucial as that of any other state.

The BJP wants to win UP to flex its muscle at the national level. The SP and BSP would be fighting for their survival on home turf. They have no national ambition. Thus, the two regional parties have an advantage over the BJP. People voting in an Assembly election are focused on the local agenda. The UP voter is only too aware that he/she needs a government that works well for him or her, and he or she is not deluded by national glory as such. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who represents Varanasi, might be an adopted UP-ite but it may not work any wonders for the BJP in the Assembly poll. UP has no option but to look after its own interests. That will be the deciding factor, and not the performance of the BJP’s government at the Centre. It is a provincial election, pure and simple. It is not a referendum on the Modi government or on demonetisation.