The unravelling of Uttar Pradesh

As someone who believes that India is a rich country that has been impoverished because of the incompetence of our political class...

As someone who believes that India is a rich country that has been impoverished because of the incompetence of our political class, I have watched the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh with growing dismay. You only need to walk down a street in Mumbai or Delhi to see that poverty caused by bad governance is the only issue in Uttar Pradesh. Every other pavement hawker, beggar, derelict or homeless person you meet in the mean streets of our cities is from Uttar Pradesh. Vijay Kumar from Allahabad sells paan in Mumbai from a tiny pavement stall near the Vidhan Sabha. He makes around Rs 3,000 a month, of which he pays Rs 700 for the hovel he rents in a nearby shantytown. But he stays on in the city because its pavements offer him a better standard of living than his home state.

The same is true for Ajay Kumar from Gorakhpur, who makes about Rs 3,000 a month selling bananas from a basket that he moves from pavement to pavement when the municipality’s demolition men arrive. Even those of Uttar Pradesh’s citizens who do not live on the pavements of Mumbai and Delhi are worse off than the citizens of most other Indian states. But you would not know it from the issues that their political leaders have raised in this election campaign.

The Congress party’s crown prince, Rahul Gandhi, offers voters “secularism” in the form of a personal guarantee. “Had a member of my family been prime minister in 1992, the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished,” he told them proudly.

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The BJP offers Hindu voters high-tech communal propaganda in a shameful CD that makes every Indian Muslim sound like a traitor. This CD was withdrawn when the Election Commission noticed that it was inciting communal hatred. But the party continued its hate campaign through advertisements that hinted that every Muslim was a Pakistani in his heart.

Then we have the two main contenders in the election, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s

Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, who offer the people of Uttar Pradesh only the politics of caste. How very sad for our largest and most populous state!

Uttar Pradesh has no business to be poor. It is poor because it has the misfortune of having a really dismal collection of politicians and political parties to choose from. Let me give you an example of what I mean when I say that poverty in India is the direct result of bad governance. A statistic that this column has mentioned before is that if we took the money we spend on poverty alleviation programmes annually and distributed it via money order among those who live below the poverty line, every family would get Rs 8,000 a month and automatically rise above the poverty line.

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This was lucidly confirmed, a couple of weeks ago, by the Chief Economic Adviser to the Finance Ministry, Ashok Lahiri. This is what he told Outlook magazine: “The Ninth Plan (1997-2002) document said that the amount of money we spend for poverty alleviation — around Rs 40,000 crore — would have given around Rs 8,000 per month per poor family, which would be sufficient to buy three kilos of food grain every day.”

Well? How is that for a statistic to think about?

If I were prime minister for a day, I would scrap all anti-poverty programmes and start sending out money orders of Rs 8,000 each but, alas, it’s not that easy. Without the state governments improving their standards of governance, nothing can happen.

The tragedy of Uttar Pradesh is that not only have living conditions not improved but in many ways they have gotten worse. In the old days, when I went to school in Uttar Pradesh, it was, if not rich, at least beautiful. Its rivers were clean, its towns full of old world charm, its air fresh and its villages attractive in a primitive sort of way.

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All of these things have deteriorated before our eyes in the past two decades and the deterioration can be traced to almost the exact moment when Ayodhya became the state’s main political issue. While the Congress and BJP played the politics of temple and mosque, local political parties woke up to the simple equations of caste. And it has been downhill since.

Can things improve? Easily. All the state needs is one chief minister who has the determination to change the political agenda. One chief minister who is not tainted by the rotten politics of the past 20 years. Unfortunately for Uttar Pradesh, such a chief minister is not going to become available as a result of this election. We will have to wait for the next one and this is a big, big problem because India cannot go forward if a state as large and important as Uttar Pradesh continues to lag behind.