Punditry about elections is, understandably, about forecasting their results. Since opinion writers generally aren't privy to exclusive information, their predictions are a form of entertainment. A reporter's insights into likely election results are always more nutritious than a columnist's because eye-witness accounts, even when they are anecdotal, have some roughage: fact-free speculation has none. An auto- wallah is a more reliable guide to the pulse of the people than your average op-ed writer.
So instead of wasting your time with the who-will-win question, this column will deal in wishfulness: with who ought to win in Uttar Pradesh. For the liberal commentator in 2017, there is a certain pathos to this exercise: with Shah-Modi in the saddle, astride the great stallion, Bharat, to be dreaming up electoral scenarios that fit liberal hopes of a happily-ever-after isn't just wishful, it's wistful. But bear with me.
If the Bharatiya Janata Party were to win a plurality or a majority of seats in UP, the implications for a materialist understanding of election behaviour are dire and the prospects for a pluralist politics even bleaker. The BJP doesn't have a chief ministerial candidate for this election; it has staked its chances on the prime minister's standing and charisma, his ability to repeat his extraordinary success in the 2014 general election and Amit Shah's gift for Hindu consolidation.
The BJP doesn't have a single non-Hindu candidate in the fray. Were it to win, it would confirm that the politics of exclusion and 'controlled polarization' exemplified by the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 are a shortcut to political power even (or especially) in a state with a substantial Muslim population. The formula that helped the BJP take Assam will have been retested, signed and sealed in India's largest state.
A BJP victory would also indicate that the economic hardship caused by demonetization was discounted by an electorate that saw the measure as a constructive first step towards bringing the rich and unscrupulous to book. This would suggest that material deprivation is secondary to ressentiment when it comes to making political choices in an exceptionally poor state. An even more depressing conclusion would be that a relatively resilient coalition of voters made up of the respectable poor, substantial non-Yadav peasant groups and the urban middle and lower middle classes allowed the BJP to ignore the alienation of an underclass of labourers, artisans, hawkers and the self-employed poor squeezed by demonetization.
UP is the sangh parivar's modern karmabhoomi; this is where it made its Hindu-nationalist bones by razing the Babri Masjid. Were the BJP to be swept to power here as some opinion polls suggest it might be, the temptation to read this as an endorsement of Hindutva and the sometimes paused but never shelved bid to formally enthrone Hindutva by building a gigantic temple on the site of the demolished mosque would become irresistible. With Narendra Modi sitting on an absolute majority in Delhi and his proxy in power in Lucknow, the clamour for the Ram Mandir might reach a crescendo.
There are those who argue that the powers-that-be in the BJP wouldn't want to distract attention from Modi's narrative of vikas by stoking the Ayodhya issue. The idea that the BJP has moved on from Ram-Mandir politics or that the bhavya mandir is a mothballed curio, cursorily dusted off at election time, isn't persuasive, but even if it were true, political parties can't control the Furies that they unleash. A BJP government in UP would be the curtain-raiser for another act of this savage passion play.
The alternative to a BJP government, according to most polls, is a second innings for Akhilesh Yadav. The last three months have seen a media rehabilitation of the Yadav dynast so concerted and so at odds with the previous characterization of his government as a dysfunctional, lawless kleptocracy that it's hard not to wonder if this chorus of hosannas has been scripted. At the very least, it would seem as if the wise men who cover UP for newspapers and 24/7 channels saw a bicycle-shaped constellation in the night sky and followed it and lo, on a charpai under a spreading mango tree, gambolled two sturdy, immaculately conceived infants, vikas and nyaya. The journalists must have gazed upon this tableau and found it good because newsrooms were wallpapered with happy tidings of the miracles Akhilesh had worked in development and law-and-order.
So one major narrative in this election season is that Akhilesh Yadav's feats of road and metro building, his newly on-call police, which respond to a dialled 100 like driven Uberistas, and his pension schemes add up to a dynamic new populism. This, combined with his new freedom from the burden of incumbency thanks to his rift with his father, his uncles and their thuggish henchmen, has made him a real contender for another term. Even UP's Muslims, the story goes, have forgiven him his government's callousness or worse during and after the Muzaffarnagar riots and are more likely to vote for him than they are for their other major suitor, the Bahujan Samaj Party.
Which brings us to Behenji. In the world according to me, Mayavati would be well on the way to becoming UP's chief minister again. She isn't the incumbent and her previous term in office saw the law-and-order situation in UP improve markedly. A former director general of the provincial armed constabulary told me that keeping the peace on the BSP's watch was easy because Dalits had been at the receiving end of lawlessness for so long that Mayavati was ideologically committed to law and order. As a regular visitor to Lucknow, I can vouch for the fact that the city looked tended and orderly at the end of her tenure. She pioneered a scheme for low income urban housing (Kanshi Ram Shahri Garib Awas Yojana), which actually built and distributed more than a hundred thousand dwelling units.
Not only are her development and law-and-order credentials more robust than Akhilesh's, she has, in stark contrast with the BJP, gone the extra mile to make her list of candidates representative of UP's principal minority, its Muslims. This is often dismissed as no more than political arithmetic: Dalits account for 20 per cent of UP's population and Muslims make up about 18 per cent. Add them up and you have, in theory, an unstoppable alliance.
Mayavati hasn't spent a lifetime in politics without working out that elections are more complicated than simple addition. The cynical view of her bid to create a Dalit-Muslim constituency doesn't acknowledge the BSP's historical commitment to building political coalitions made up of many communities. There is a reason the party is called the Bahujan Samaj Party. Kanshi Ram, Mayavati's mentor and the BSP's ideologue, conceived of the party as a broad social coalition anchored by Dalits, a neat inversion of the Congress and BJP model where savarna vanguards led plebeian camp followers.
A victory for Mayavati would bear out the reasonable belief that a talent for keeping the peace, a willingness to push back against the heartland's habit of falling apart, the staying power to implement complex welfare schemes (social housing as opposed to free bicycles) pays political dividends. It would demonstrate that poor, marginalized communities can come together to create a successful pluralist politics.
But if the news is to be believed, this isn't going to happen. Every poll, every pundit, has the BSP trailing the front runners, the BJP and the SP. It could be that Mayavati's reputation for corruption holds her back, although given UP's standards of uprightness, that's hard to believe. Maybe it's a failure on her part to build a buoyant, inspirational narrative about herself and her party. Perhaps she needs bespoke image-building courtesy someone like Prashant Kishor. There is a simpler explanation: that it's harder for a party dominated by Dalits to build political coalitions because other groups don't want to be led by them. Perhaps prejudice and magical thinking will always trump the hard slog needed to build broad solidarities in India's fractured, fearful heartland. Or not. We shall find out.
