Playing I-cards

As Bihar approaches the first anniversary of an election that, through all the complex arithmetic of identity politics, delivered a non-sectarian message for governance, UP approaches an election that’s inevitably raising the question whether it can achieve a similar political transformation. It would be right to say that the signs aren’t good. The only time major parties in the state are not trying to encash cheques in vote banks is when they are trying to increase the deposit base. But, interestingly, the limits to this strategy already seem apparent.

The BJP’s good showing at recent urban municipal polls would seem to be in large measure a reaction to real and perceived wooing by Mulayam Singh Yadav of the more strident representatives of minority politics. Even the BJP is not claiming that its wins were courtesy campaigns on governance issues. But just as this shows the limits of identity politics to SP, it also demonstrates them to the BJP. The latter needs the former to be able to appear attractive to some section of voters, who seemed otherwise to have deserted the party in recent polls. Most instructively, even Mayawati, the early favourite, is feeling the constraints. Her nervousness at the BJP’s showing has translated to somewhat panicky courting of the “Brahmin vote”. She also has to manage her core vote, which the SP has been enviously eyeing.

An optimistic reading of this, and many more and complicated manoeuvres in identity politicking, is that the politicians may realise as elections draw closer that they need something more. Against that one has to set an obscurantist political characteristic – constituency level calculations matter hugely in UP and elections tend to get decided as a sum of a maze of local factors. This is a disincentive for politicians in terms of putting together a statewide, non-sectarian electoral narrative. If someone or some party can change that, it would be one of the most spectacular and welcome stories in Indian politics.