changing equation: the 'national' becomes the new 'notional' in u.p!

8/2/2019 Changing Equation: The 'national' becomes the new 'notional' in U.P!

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4 | U T S ’ V O I C E > M a r c h 1 6 - 3 1 , 2 0 1 2

Elections are the strangest moments in

the life of a democracy. They are so

strange that the question of true

nature of the democracy, largest or

the smallest, dynastic or oligarchic, deficient

or delinquent become redundant. They affect

them all similarly. Come election time and one

would find hardly a difference. The democracy-

deliverer United States of America would look

exactly like that of democratically challenged

Pakistan, and making out democracy inventor

United Kingdom from democracy importer

India would be a task tougher than those terri-

fying mathematical equations that almost

killed our childhood.

The changes elections bring to the behav-

ior of the leaders are cataclysmic to say the

least. They make Mahatmas out of the murder-

ers. They change rioters into Ram-Bhakts,

sycophants into saints and yes, communities

into vote-banks. Yet, the biggest strength of the

elections is bestowing a sense of humility on

the leaders and opinion-makers alike, both of

whom don’t seem to know otherwise that it

existed in the first place.

I am neither of the two, and had successful-

The changing

equation

The ‘national’ becomes the new‘notional’ in U.P. this time round

BY

SAMAR



ly sensed the public mood till recently. I would

laugh at the predictions made by those know-

all jerks gleaming in the studios. I would make

friendly bets and would look forward to the

days of counting and declaration of results, for

those drinks my friends would be paying for. I

had hardly lost any of them till date.

Just to give an example, I was richer by a

couple of bottles by the end of the last assem-

bly elections in Uttar Pradesh for the simple

fact that no one apart from me and that fiery

journalist Vidya Subramaniam from The Hindu

was giving the Bahujan Samaj Party and its

leader Mayawati a clear mandate. Even this

time, she was the one closest to gauge the

public mood and hint that it was going to be

the Samajwadi Party all the way. Maybe, that

has something to do with The Hindu style of

functioning and their belief in basing news on

facts and not sermons, which ironically is so‘Un-Hindu’ a practice!

Here comes the moment of revelation! I got

it all wrong this time. That too by a huge dis-

tance, 1500 kilometers to be precise!

Well, there is no point in challenging the

exactness of the distance for it was ‘measured’

by none other than the victor himself, and who

in his senses would want to challenge an out-

right victor. Way before the start of even the

first phase of voting, Akhilesh Yadav, the new

Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, had asserted

that he was 1500 kilometers and 51 constituen-

cies ahead of the other Yuvraj, Rahul Gandhi.

He was right. Samajwadi Kranti Rath of

Akhilesh had traversed that much even before

Rahul hitting the campaign trail. But then, UP

elections were not about Congress or its

crown-prince, was it? He was, of course, the

darling of the media which remained in awe of

him but who takes electronic media seriously

anyway? Public memory is short, but not short

enough to have already forgotten all the

Barkha Datts and Vir Sanghvis, is it?

Actually, I am already wondering about the

failure of these self-designated custodians of

national conscience in giving a spin to

Congress’s performance in Uttar Pradesh.

Think of it, getting to 28 seats from 22 held in an

assembly of 403 is inconsequential in terms of

sheer numbers but then who had stopped the

spin-doctors like Arnab Goswami to analyze it

in Percentage-Point terms? He could have

been screaming that the “truth of the matter”

is that Congress has gained an increase of 27

per cent, a befitting proof for the success of

Rahul Gandhi in winning the hearts and the

minds of UP electorate”! He could have added,

for a good measure, that at this rate Congress

would return to power in UP by 2060!

May be they restrained themselves for the

game has always eluded the self-proclaimed

game changer. There is a limit to one’s capaci-

ty of making heroes out of nobodies. They had

done it before. In order to cleanse themselves

of the Radia tapes, they invented a fake Gandhi

aka Anna Hazare and fallen flat on their faces.

They had also mastered the art of making

villains out of heroes through ‘media trails’.

Giving a hoot to the judicial process, they

would dub a person ‘anti-national’ just

because the police claim that. Throwing all the

ideals of justice and fair trial into the dustbin,they would run ‘dramatized’ accounts of

events like parliament attack and pronounce

the accused as convicted even if the Court

were to exonerate the person later. Good that

a sense of wisdom prevailed on them this time

round and they desisted from doing something

similar.

Or was it the fear of that gentleman

Markandey Katju, chairman of Press Council of

India, who had taken the onerous task of bring-

ing some ethics back? Or, was it the habit of

the game changer of changing the not the

game in hand, but the game itself as in moving

from soccer to cricket in one leap of faith!

Whatever it was for, it is welcome.

Cut to that Sadhwi in saffron whose renun-

ciation (and rejoining) of political parties

seems to be far more real than her claims of

having renounced the worldly charms. Mere

idea of her would make all the Kabirs and

Nanaks turn into their graves with repulsion.

They lived and died for eradicating caste

among other things and ensured that at least

in the case of saffron wearing sadhus and here

is one sadhwi, airdropped into UP’s political

scene because of her caste!

Her party that used to fashion itself as the

army of Lord Rama himself has realised that in

the badlands of UP religion gets trumped by

caste and so it would have to dump Rama.

Now, dumping anything for power was neither

new nor hard for them as they had specialized

in the art of picking the issue of the Ram tem-

ple and dropping it at will. They replaced their

bets from Rama and put it on a Rajput, albeit a

Lodh one owing to the numbers of their kin.

End result, they came a cropper, losing even

that seat of Ayodhya that has catapulted them

to the national scene.

But then, who said that UP elections were

about BJP either? The electorate had decided

to have a clean break from their past. They had

decided to consign all the accusations of being

illiterate savages of feudal badlands to the

dustbins of history. They had decided to give

evidence for nothing less than the theory of

nationalism propounded by Benedict

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U T S ’ V O I C E > M a r c h 1 6 - 3 1 , 2 0 1 2



6 | U T S ’ V O I C E > M a r c h 1 6 - 3 1 , 2 0 1 2

Anderson, the theory that says that nations are

nothing more than imagined communities.

And once the imagination is found to be

based on shaky foundations, it gets dumped by

the people. We are that part of the nation, UPelectorate must have thought which the rest of

the nation and its leadership can do without. It

remembered, with horror, the statement made

by Home Minister P. Chidambaram that India

would have registered higher growth had

North and East not impaired its quest for the

same. They knew that not one of the accused

of the 2G scam that cost the exchequer INR

176000 Crore and shivered at the audacity of

the claim. They put the motor mouth in his

place.

This is how the polarization that took place

in UP rendered the ‘national’ irrelevant. If it’s all

about getting looted, we would better get loot-

ed by our own people seemed to be the thun-

dering reply emanating out of the eerily silent

electronic voting machines. Congress has for-

feited its deposits in 240 constituencies while

BJP was not trailing far behind at 230! The idea

of the national was just a notional one.

And this is where I had gone terribly wrong.

I was giving BSP at least 170 seats even at the

eve of the counting. Somewhere deep within

my inner self, I knew that people have not for-

gotten the dangerous lawless days during the

Samajwadi Party’s regime five years ago. I

could see the unflinching support of the Dalits

she enjoyed. I could see the indignation of her

folks at seeing the Elephants getting covered

while all the lotuses adorning the temples and

cycles plying on the road.

Yet, something was changing deep within,

something I, and many others, had no clue of.

It was a polarization of a very different kind. It

was one against the assertion of the Dalits,

their renewed and revitalized claim on dignity

that has made the erstwhile rulers uneasy,

very uneasy. Behind the façade of ‘Sarvajan’

politics of the BSP laid the control in the hands

of the Dalits and it was enough to send shivers

down the spines of the higher up.

For the uninitiated, the BSP’s control in the

hands of Dalits was absolute not merely at the

level of Maywati herself, it went down to the

level of every single constituency where the

MLA was answerable to the Sector in charge,

invariably a Dalit giving rise to a flood of repul-




| 3U T S ’ V O I C E > M a r c h 1 6 - 3 1 , 2 0 1 2

sion. All one needed was to tap this into a neg-

ative vote, which the Samajwadis so success-

fully managed.

This is not to say that Mayawati or BSP

were not at fault. They had not merely faltered

but failed their own people. For their folks, the

parks with statues were good, but hospitals

and schools would have been far better. They

could have afforded to ignore the National

Rural Health Mission scam had something

material reached down the line and initiated a

process of converting the idea of dignity into a

material claim. They could have ignored all the

killings at the behest of ‘non-Bahujan’ MLAs of

the party, had it not meant Dalits themselves

being the victims in most of the cases.

Mayawati had forgotten the most impor-

tant lesson of the last assembly elections that

it was as much her victory as was the defeat of

Mulayam Singh Yadav- led Samajwadi party.The ‘goondaraj’ of the regime had hinted than

anything, just about anything would be better

than that. She could have chosen not to return

the favour. She woke up to all this, but way too

late. By that time, the process of polarization

was already reaching its crescendo. At one

hand, the electorate had decided to punish the

pretenders that came in the garbs of Congress

and BJP and on the other, geared up for a fight

for dominating the turf. And they did that by

channeling all anti-BSP votes into the SP cof-

fers.

The end result was part satisfying, part har-

rowing. The results have shown that the days

of upper-caste lordships are over. Now, it’s a

struggle between the erstwhile deprived ones.

The sad part is that this struggle is not a

healthy competition but a dirty fight to finish

turning victims into perpetrators and vice

versa. Those who should have been natural

allies are out on prowl for each other.

Remember, the victory is not really such a

landslide as it seems to be. The difference is

just of three percentage points implying that

the Dalits are standing firmly with BSP, and

OBCs with SP. The point, now, is to build a

bridge between them instead of barricading

them into warring camps. That would be the

spontaneous and natural alliance among the

masses, and whoever starts that will be the

master of history.UTS’


changing equation: the 'national' becomes the new 'notional' in u.p!

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