Shashank Suresh
The Uttar Pradesh election of 2022 is expected to take place between February and March of that year. Since independence, no Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has been re-elected after serving for five years. So far, just four CMs have served for five years or almost five years. Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, is expected to finish his fifth year in office in the next 5-6 months. Will he be able to end the curse and return as Chief Minister after the next election?
The former United Front administration, led by the late V.P. Singh, decided in December 1990 to announce the execution of the Mandal Commission Report’s recommendations, presented in December 1980. Among other things, the historic Report offered two epochal recommendations: one, to reserve 27 percent of government and public sector jobs for Other Backward Classes and admittance to state-run educational institutions.
And, two, to begin with, to change production relations in the agriculture sector. The second proposal, of course, has been put on hold since it entails the banned task of improving class-based rights. The acceptance of the Mandal recommendations on employment and educational reservations, on the other hand, was radical enough to provoke a political upheaval of a magnitude never seen before in India’s political parties since Independence, which was riven internally for and against the policy.
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Yogi Adityanath, an ordained priest of the Gorakhnath Muth, was appointed to lead the secular-constitutional executive in India’s most significant state in 2017 to advance that ideological goal. Between 2014 and 2017, Modi’s leadership had so altered popular preferences, particularly among the influential new urban classes spawned by ten years of neoliberal economic policies, that no one, not even the customary court-addict, chose to investigate the rightness or wrongness of Yogi’s decision in a legal reference to the genius of the Indian constitution.
The difficulty for the Bharatiya Janata Party is that the saffron leadership in this state of states has not produced a government to match the chief executive’s otherworldly qualities. Nothing has gone right in Uttar Pradesh. The horrific images of bodies floating on the sacred Ganges continue to serve as a symbol for the state’s material and spiritual failings.
These heart-breaking images, which continue to be shown on foreign news outlets, stand in stark contrast to the millions of diyas that have adorned Hindu celebrations along the sacred Ganges throughout Yogi’s time as a Hindutva icon. The inconsiderate demotion of the deceased, devoid of the dignity accorded to them in death, has been truly astonishing.
The Opposition
What will be fascinating to see is how the various political opposition in the crucial state responds to the saffron threat or fails to respond. The Samajwadi Party’s strong performance in the recently concluded Panchayat elections may prompt the party to believe that it should enter the Assembly race independently. So may the Congress, which won 61 Panchayats, believing that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s much-improved groundwork and a fresh, youthful base, may have reintroduced some forgotten tribes to the great old party as a primary choice.
Mayawati of the BSP, on the other hand, isn’t one to sacrifice her aspirations for some illusory unity that might not place her at the top. The ruling BJP is well aware of these issues and would stop at nothing to crush the opposition’s apple carts, whatever they may be. As we all know, money has been a significant factor in inter-party negotiations in recent years, and the BJP has far more of it than the other parties combined.
On the other hand, opposition parties may believe it prudent to reach an agreement with the BJP first to remove the “nationalists” from state power before other reasons take precedence. In such a case, the Mamata-led Trinamool Congress‘s outstanding performance in West Bengal may serve as an inspiration. Mamata herself may decide to devote more time to events in Uttar Pradesh to achieve a similar result.
What needs to be seen is how much the farmers’ dissatisfactions, many of whom supported the BJP the last time around, will exceed the BJP’s ability to create a new rift among them. Then there’s the power of timely bounties proclaimed by the powers-that-be. The prime minister has already announced a few, including increasing the Minimum Support Price for a few grains and free vaccines at state-run institutions until November. Unfortunately, many fatalities could have been avoided if this had been done sooner.
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Given the experience of migrant workers during the first phase of the pandemic and the excessive cruelty and insensitive collapse of empathy during the murderous second phase, how far this cunning politics can meet the scale of its alienation from the majority of the population remains a question. As the results in West Bengal and the panchayat polls in Uttar Pradesh show, it appears unlikely that the Hindutva right-wing will achieve its strategic goal of winning in all states to declare India a Hindu nation and then alter the secular-democratic state’s constitutional arrangements as needed.