At Lucknow airport last week, a gentleman came and introduced himself to me. He said he was a Chennai-based garment exporter who had moved South five years ago having sold off his business in Noida. Although he belongs to Bihar, is married to a native of Uttar Pradesh and has lived most of his life in North India, he decided to pack his bags and move to distant Tamil Nadu because, as he put it, “Businesses have no future in UP”
I got interested in his story outlining the contrasts between the two States. “I have no power problem; load-shedding is unheard of in Chennai. Trade unions are responsible and never make extravagant or unfair demands. Law and order is assured; I have never faced extortion threats and don’t feel unsafe driving home from my factory late at night. Banks run more efficiently and you don’t have to grease every palm to get funds released. Corruption is there, but it is usually single-window clearance which makes life so much easier for business people,” he explained. On each of these counts he indicted Uttar Pradesh, saying if that was the kind of lawlessness he had to encounter in showcase Noida, it was obvious what must be happening in places with a lower profile.
Each time I hear such stories, and I hear them with unfailing regularity, I feel very sad for Uttar Pradesh — a State for which I have always had a very soft corner. Although I have never lived there as such, I chose to study the freedom movement in Uttar Pradesh as my subject, both for my M Phil (which I did not complete) and my doctoral dissertation at Oxford. That led to my involvement with India’s most populous and politically vital State. Since 1979, I have extensively scoured Uttar Pradesh and visited almost every district apart from staying in distant places like Ballia, Ghazipur, Azamgarh and Gorakhpur for months on end. Uttar Pradesh was a different place then. It was a reasonably well-administered State, even if not on top of tables showing India’s development indices. The Green Revolution had brought prosperity to western Uttar Pradesh, while the rice revolution in the late 70s altered eastern Uttar Pradesh’s economic profile to a significant extent. Politics was always rather murky, at least since 1967 when the Congress’s monopoly of power was broken by the rebellious Charan Singh, but even that murkiness was confined within certain parameters. It did not impinge on people’s daily lives. Uttar Pradesh was blessed by a succession of capable Chief Ministers, right down to VP Singh who paid a heavy political price for trying to arrest the law and order rot. Later, during his first stint, Kalyan Singh showed great promise and there was renewed hope even in the early 90s that the State would be put back on the road to progress.
All that seems distant memory now. Each time I visit Lucknow, which is at least six times in a year, things appear to get worse. The Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy, one of India’s finest, is steadily going downhill both in terms of talent and commitment. Political interference is routine and nobody has the guts to stand up to it. Officers are divided in camps, with the less competent more willing than others to follow every dictate of the political leadership. Casteism, too, is rampant now and the administrators are bunched along caste combinations. In many ways, therefore, Uttar Pradesh’s Biharisation is complete. Local talent is only too keen to get out of the State as quickly as possible. Having seen that happen in my native State of West Bengal and neighbouring Bihar, I know what the long-term consequences of merit migration will be.
The worst part is that I see no prospect of improvement. That’s because, politics has hit rock bottom with settlement of personal scores having superseded issues and ideologies. It would be a travesty of the truth to lay the blame for this solely at Ms Mayawati’s door. Arguably, she is boorish, motivated by personal vendetta and incapable of possessing a larger vision. But if political discourse is being conducted today in the idiom of slum dwellers, everybody has to be held collectively responsible for it. Politicians at the helm, of course, are largely accountable for legitimising this. Just look at the names they choose to give their rallies: If Mayawati calls for a Dhikkar rally, Mulayam Singh responds with a series of Thu-thu meetings where participants are literally exhorted to spit repeatedly! This is reciprocated, predictably, with a Pardafaash gathering. If Mulayam Singh started the downward spiral by physically assaulting Mayawati in 1993 when she decided to break her party’s alliance with his outfit, she has done one better by slapping a litany of cases against him for real and imagined infringements of the law. Political dialogue is so uncouth that Opposition leaders are believed to routinely declare at public meetings that the Chief Minister is not even worthy of being raped. On her part, Mayawati is shown on video asking party MLAs to pass on a certain portion of the kickbacks they receive for sanctioning projects under their Local Area Development Scheme back into the BSP’s coffers. These are the issues that everybody talks about, newspapers comment upon and TV channels report in extenso. Is this politics? Is this connected even remotely to the ideologies expounded by Mulayam Singh’s mentor Ram Manohar Lohia or Mayawati’s icon, Babasaheb Ambedkar? There was much criticism of the BJP’s Ram Mandir agitation of the 90s for communalising the State’s politics. But, in retrospect, that seems to have been rather decent in comparison to the gutter levels to which political discourse has degenerated now.
Contrary to the views of the non-voting, chattering classes that dominate the metros, politics and governance do matter a great deal especially in underdeveloped parts of the country. In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, private initiative is virtually negligible and the people depend almost entirely on the Government for sustenance. Agreed, it shouldn’t be like this; Governments are required to be facilitators not implementers. But, barring parts of Noida and Greater Noida, this doesn’t happen anywhere else in the State. And even in Noida, the story of the businessman who has migrated to Chennai reveals the stark reality. But if the Government is too preoccupied with settling scores with political rivals, where will it find the time to govern?
Regrettably, during its five-year stint in office, the BJP too failed the State, partly on account of its own incompetence and partly because it was unable to arrest the rampant politicisation of caste and vice versa. That Uttar Pradesh’s equation with Bihar in popular culture (Ek chumma dei de, badle mein UP, Bihar lai le) no longer raises eyebrows is indicative of the nadir the State has reached. I am afraid it’s a terminal case.
There is only one solution, drastic and surgical. Uttar Pradesh must be broken up into at least five more States to ensure that gangrene doesn’t spread through the entire body. Uttaranchal has shown the way. India’s political leadership needs to keep sentiment and temporary expediencies aside and take this bold decision. Now!
(This originally appeared on April 20, 2003. Chandan Mitra is travelling.)
