Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

Laughing Away The Uttar Pradesh Blues

Just the thought is breathtaking. If, in 1975, we had had a President like K R Narayanan, a man willing to follow his own conscience, these last 22 years might have turned out entirely different. Think of it: we might have been rid of that great destroyer of institutions, Indira, before she got around to doing her worst damage. We would not have inherited her banana-republic son, Rajiv, and all his pernicious legacies. We would have been spared the unlimited and unwarranted powers Sanjay, her street-thug son, grabbed for himself, thereby inspiring generations of sons and nephews into illegal action.

In fact, all kinds of precedents for all kinds of disgraceful things would never have been set.

Instead, Rashtrapati Bhavan was home that year to a backbone-impaired man called Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, far too ready to grovel to whatever tune the lady from Safdarjung Road sang. To his perpetual shame, Fakhruddin signed the proclamation that put us through the two years of Indira's Emergency. Two years that, arguably, set in motion a slide in our politics we are yet to recover from.

Now I'll admit, I don't know for sure that either the 22 years or present-day affairs would have been substantially different if Fakhruddin had found himself a spine in 1975. But what's the harm in some optimistic fantasy-making? Because the reality is that Narayanan's fibre is the solitary gleam in last week's murky events in Uttar Pradesh. I am overjoyed that he showed that the Presidency need not be a mere machine that hands out signatures on demand.

I said, and meant, solitary; because I am thoroughly dismayed by the rest of the UP goings-on. I must be an incorrigible grouch, because nothing else about what went down in UP offered any joy. Not the original BJP-BSP alliance; not Mayawati's misbegotten reign; not her withdrawal of support once she had completed her six months; not Kanshi Ram's proclamation that he is an "opportunist" and ready to ally with anyone, even the BJP again; not the BJP's willingness to consider that possibility; not the defections that allowed Kalyan Singh to stay in his chair; not his survival; not the rioting that posed as assembly proceedings; not the farce over whether the state should be put under President's rule. Nothing.

Really, it's hard to imagine a more ludicrous sequence of events than UP has endured through much of 1997: last week, then, was just the topping. And it left me wondering what kind of electoral choice Uttar Pradesh has been reduced to, should it face elections any time soon.

Let's run through them, shall we?

The Congress under Kesri, despite Mani Shankar Aiyar's eloquence, is no more than a sorry gas-bag of wheeler-dealers whose wheels have fallen off and whose deals get less and less palatable. In UP's assembly, they are reduced to something like a dozen seats -- I'm sorry, I care too little to check the precise number -- and even those must be too precarious to place much confidence in.

Freed, in its current condition, from ideology and principle, the Congress is left with manipulation and intrigue in its efforts to exert some kind of influence on political affairs. This explains Kesri's constant grumpy noises about Gujral and Vaghela, and Deve Gowda before them. The fortunes of these three, at one time or another, have been in the hands of the Congress. I'm waiting for the day when someone will call the Congress's bluff and force the country's oldest party into its worst nightmare: new elections. That will probably prune their count of seats down to a nice, fat zero.

The less said about the BSP, the better. I mean, what is there to say about a man, Kanshi Ram, who says quite proudly that he is an opportunist? Who will bed -- politically, of course -- anyone who so much as waves in his direction, only to dump them with the next wave? Whose idea of brave action is to surround himself with men and machine guns and go thrash a journalist or three? Why anyone takes Kanshi Ram and his comely sidekick seriously, I cannot fathom. So I'm going to stop doing so. Right here, right now. Kanshi Ram and Mayawati, you make me laugh. Ha ha.

As for Mulayam's Samajwadi Party, going by the numbers alone, it has clearly spelled out some kind of alternative to the BJP and BSP in UP. Unfortunately, being an alternative packed with old-fashioned thuggery and criminals, it is just as unsavoury as the others.

Let me mention, as briefly as its strength now merits, the Janata Dal.

Which leaves us with the triumphant survivor, Kalyan Singh. That he did survive is being celebrated in various quarters. That a man as vibrantly contemptuous of the law and the judiciary should continue as chief minister of India's largest state seems hardly worth celebrating, but there's no accounting for strange political likes, is there?

But ignoring likes for now, what survived the vote of confidence in UP, and thinks it is gaining ground across the country? The right honourable BJP. I suspect it is indeed gaining ground: more reason to put the party under the microscope. And what do we see there?

Fond of decrying defections by others, Kalyan and the BJP retained their grip in UP by getting others to defect and vote for them. Fond of running down political opportunism elsewhere, the BJP tied up with the very BSP it had a disastrous stint with in 1995. And when this second experiment collapsed, the BJP immediately offered to try again: third time lucky, who knows?

Fond of running down strange alliances by others (how many times have we heard their venerable cheerleaders utter the words "unholy alliance" in connection with the United Front government?), the BJP's record of alliances is not exactly gold-plated virtue. In Maharashtra, they are tied up with the men who defined and exalted petty crime, extortion and rioting. In Haryana, they rolled into power in the arms of Bansi Lal, owner of the Emergency's most-soiled still-living hands. In Tamil Nadu, there are constant stories about an imminent partnership with that woman who is vicious excess personified: Jayalalitha. And of course, in UP, the BJP chose to sleep with ... ha, ha, ha.

What's more, the BJP and its supporters suffer from two serious, if somewhat stupid, delusions. One, that democracy is solely and always the rule of the majority. Two, that their constituency, in fact, adds up to such a majority. To an astonishing extent, these drive the party's daily existence, even though they are also reminded daily that they cannot be true. That would be of little consequence, except for the price all of us have to pay for this foolishness.

I haven't even got to examining the BJP's own badly blotted copybook, filled as it is with delightful achievements like Ayodhya and promising to "throw Enron into the Arabian Sea."

The tragedy is that it is only the abysmal alternatives UP has that allow Kalyan Singh and his party to pretend some kind of virtue, that brings some of us to swallow this pretence. If UP had been graced with one party, just one, that was truly interested in good governance, in making a dent in that state's gargantuan problems, I feel sure Kalyan and the BJP would be out on their pious ears. Out, along with their sometime partners and opponents.

Pipedreams, pipedreams!

In Uttar Pradesh, only every fourth woman can read and write. The state's women are producing 5.1 babies each through their lives, the country's highest such number. Nine of every ten villages across the state have no -- as in zero -- medical facilities; which may help explain why 96% of UP's births happen outside medical institutions; which may in turn explain why 10% of those babies die before they are a year old.

Looking these problems straight in the eye is UP's CM. Therefore, his first task in office was a dash to pray at a makeshift Ram temple in Ayodhya. His party, after all, thinks UP's highest priority -- the nation's highest priority -- is to build a "magnificent temple to Lord Ram" where Kalyan prayed. And if he is so besotted, his predecessor in office -- ha, ha -- was equally so. She believed UP would progress if it was gifted thousands of Ambedkar statues and dozens of new and/or renamed districts.

Ha, ha, but it isn't funny, is it? Statues, a temple, renamed districts, what's the difference? What difference does each make to UP?

None. Which makes me wish President Narayanan had decided to take over the state's administration himself. We know he has a conscience, at any rate.

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