The
Message From Uttar Pradesh
By Dipankar Bhattacharya
16 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Defying all predictions of yet
another hung house, the UP elections have delivered a decisive verdict.
After fourteen years of coalition rule, Uttar Pradesh has again enabled
one single party to form government on its own and that single party
is none other than Mayawati's BSP. The SP has predictably emerged as
the runner-up, but it is way behind the BSP. The 'resurgent' BJP with
all its aggressive communal propaganda has been stalled quite spectacularly
by the UP electorate – the party has not even fifty seats in its
kitty. And the 'rejuvenated' Congress powered by Rahul Gandhi's much-publicised
'road shows' and 'grandmother's tales' from the days of Bangladesh war
has suffered yet more losses; the party spokesmen however tell us that
it would have been decimated without the rescue operation led by Rahul
Gandhi.
Media analysts may once again
describe the poll outcome in terms of the so-called anti-incumbency
factor. But anti-incumbency will be too general and too mild a term
to capture the popular anger against a government that talked of 'samajwad'
(socialism) only to hand over all power and resources to a corporate
coterie. In public perception Mulayam Singh's government had become
synonymous with a reign of growing crime and loot, terror and repression,
and yet this Amar-Sahara-Ambani show was sought to be marketed as the
grand metamorphosis of Uttar Pradesh into a great and glorious Uttam
Pradesh! If the May 2004 verdict against the NDA reflected the anger
of India suffering at the directors of the India shining show, May 2007
has brought home the anger of the UP electorate against the unmitigated
lies of Uttam Pradesh and corporate socialism!
The new winning combination
of Mayawati has not emerged overnight. She has been working in this
direction for quite some time. In fact, the alliances forged earlier
with the BJP had reflected the same direction, but a BSP-BJP alliance
was always circumscribed by the ideological-political domination of
the BJP and proved uneasy and short-lived on both occasions. Mayawati
therefore embarked on her latest mission to internalise the alliance
within the framework of the BSP. Her new slogans and new overtures were
all designed to attain this objective and the election results tell
us that they have worked wonders, at least for the time being. The so-called
dalit-brahmin alliance has succeeded in attracting large sections of
smaller backward castes, other upper castes and the Muslim community
as well, and the tilt can be seen easily in terms of votes as well as
seats.
Political commentators have
begun describing this as the mellowing and maturing of Mayawati, and
as the victory of an inclusivist approach in dalit politics with possible
ramifications in national politics. Mayawati is being lauded for reinventing
the old pre-Mandal Congress equation with a new rainbow coalition. The
focus has thus once again turned on individual style and social engineering
with little or no reference to the social and political context that
has made this new social coalition possible. The results from UP bear
a significant resemblance to the change witnessed by Bihar in 2005 except
that the dalit factor does not operate in Bihar on the lines of the
BSP and the BJP finds a place in the Bihar scheme of things. Both UP
and Bihar tell us that while the Congress remains marginalised, the
momentum unleashed by the Mandal-Kamandal waves is now being overtaken
by a new economic and political reality.
The JD (later RJD) in Bihar
and the SP in UP had emerged primarily by riding on the Mandal wave,
but they consolidated themselves by positioning themselves against the
ascendant and aggressive BJP. But unmitigated misappropriation of public
funds and criminalisation of politics became the hallmarks of their
new-found political domination, and the vast majority of dalits and
MBCs felt alienated and excluded in every sphere. Meanwhile, the chickens
of the neo-liberal economic policies have all come home to roost –
acute poverty and unemployment, and in many cases starvation and suicides
have become the order of the day. The deepening agrarian crisis and
the blatant state-sponsored corporate campaign to usurp all resources
including fertile agricultural land have begun pushing rural India to
the brink of new uncertainties.
It is this stark economic
reality and not the politics of so-called 'secular front' that had scripted
the BJP's spectacular fall in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. And with
the BJP's decline and the rise of basic issues, we see a new dynamism
and fluidity in the political situation. The ruling classes are trying
to contain this growing social churning and mass unrest within the framework
of so-called 'development' and 'governance'. These have been Nitish
Kumar's slogans to power in Bihar and Mayawati too is moving in this
direction. Some commentators have compared Mayawati's current rise to
the arrival of Lalu Prasad in Bihar in the early 1990s. Back then, Lalu
Prasad was a largely unknown quantity with a brand new rhetoric of social
justice. Mayawati, by contrast, has already travelled the distance from
bahujan to sarvajan.
Uttar Pradesh has once again
compelled sociologists and political analysts to acknowledge the dynamism
of 'castes'. Caste may be a reality in India, but it clearly does not
operate in a fixed and traditional manner. Every time the pundits expect
castes to behave in a certain pre-determined pattern of 'identity politics',
they spring a new surprise by throwing up new equations. New signs of
fluidity and realignment nullify the predictions of fragmentation and
regimentation. This is how class polarises and transcends castes. There
is absolutely no point in either lauding or blaming Mayawati for rewriting
caste equations – what remains to be done is to enable the people
to grasp the class character of her politics. The BSP is one party that
never declares its policies, but all its policies will now anyway be
revealed in practice – and that is the basis on which the people
will now judge the BSP.
[The author is General Secretary
of the CPI(ML)]
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