Singh hands over the Lakshmipat Singhania science award to K. Kasturirangan. (PTI)

New Delhi, Dec. 23: Mulayam Singh Yadav is wooing the Muslims and the backward castes, Mayavati is busy juggling caste equations and the Congress’s sole obsession is what miracles Rahul Gandhi could work to pull it out of its morass. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aware that the battle for Uttar Pradesh is round the corner, reflected today on its future through his prism of development and governance.

Singh, normally not given to politicalspeak, particularly in academic forums, departed from his own norms while addressing the Lakshmipat Singhania-IIM Lucknow National Leadership Awards 2006 function today. He said Uttar Pradesh “desperately” needed forward-looking and modern leadership and a government that would “invest” in the future of its people.

“They (the people of Uttar Pradesh) need a leadership that is thinking about the future. UP has been held back by a leadership that only thinks about the past,” he remarked, taking swipes at the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the two main players as well as the BJP.

If the Samajwadi and the BSP’s rhetoric was centred on centuries of casteist oppression and the need to “liberate” the oppressed castes, the BJP’s theme song was “righting the wrongs inflicted on the Hindus by Muslim rulers”.

Singh said: “Far too much public attention has been focused on the legacies of history, and not enough on the potential of the future. We need a leadership that has the vision to ensure that government institutions perform better, attitudes change, and taxpayers get their money’s worth. Leadership, in the final analysis, is about tapping the potential of the followers. It is about challenging people to seek new horizons.”

While Mulayam and Amitabh Bachchan may crow about Uttar Pradesh being India’s uttam pradesh (top state), the Prime Minister had his own perceptions.

“As I told the north region chief ministers’ conference some months back, the political and business leadership of this region has a lot of thinking to do on realising its potential. Its share of national income is below potential. In human development indicators, the region is behind western and southern states. The time has come for the region to take a great leap forward. This requires both hard work and creativity,” he stressed.

Singh asked Uttar Pradesh to take a leaf from Kerala’s book. Investing in one’s people did not require huge fiscal resources but a “committed political leadership”.

“In purely economic terms, it (Kerala) is not one of our more developed states. Yet, Kerala has human development indicators that would be the envy of many developed countries. By investing in the capabilities of its people, Kerala has empowered its people. They have been able to make the most of opportunities across the world,” he said.

Singh quoted from a study by Bibek Debroy which projected that if present trends continued, by 2020, Punjab would be where Germany is today and Uttar Pradesh would be where Punjab is today. “This cannot be an acceptable outcome. We must correct these stark inter-regional imbalances in development,” he said.