For the sake of Indian democracy, the UP governance model needs to be challenged
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: A moral psychology legitimising an unprecedented ruthlessness is now becoming the default of civil society in the state. Written by Pratap Bhanu MehtaUpdated: May 21, 2021
Uttar Pradesh has the population the size of Brazil, and 80 Lok Sabha seats. But the nature of its potential dominance in Indian politics is not simply a function of size and demography. The national influence of UP politics is magnified when it is part of the hegemonic national dispensation, as it is currently. It is no accident that fear of UP domination abated when it was governed by local parties like the SP or BSP. But beyond party alignment, the nature of the political imagination driving UP politics also matters a great deal; the demographic dominance is magnified if it is aligned to an ideological project and a governance style that seeks to be nationally dominant.
We often speak loosely of the politics of the “Hindi heartland”. This might make sense as a crude contrast with the “South”. But this is a misnomer. There is the obvious fact that the nature of development and the social basis of politics in states like Rajasthan, UP, Bihar and MP is quite diverse. Conflating them is about as analytically useful as conflating Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Amongst these states, what makes UP a special challenge is that its ideological influence on national politics is pervasive in a way that is not quite true of the other states. With the ascent of Yogi Adityanath in UP, this ideological configuration is coming into shape in a starkly chilling form that has great implications for national politics.
UP has been critical to the public staging of the Hindutva project in a way that is not true of other states. The project of communalising all of India is central to the BJP. But the symbolic significance of Ayodhya, Kashi, Mathura as performances of Hindu Unity and as a wedge around which to consolidate a communal consciousness, cannot be underestimated. This is a project they will not leave uncompleted. None of the other states quite has this cache. Bihar, for all its other challenges, for almost three decades, managed to avoid the allure of a hegemonic Hindutva.
Uttar Pradesh now has a chief minister who is the fantasy of many rank and file votaries of the BJP. He is the kind of leader who satiates the allure for violence and aggressive fantasies much more directly. He has a commitment to a governance philosophy that is the purest distillation of the authoritarian-communal model that we have ever seen. It is a governance style that is penal at its core. It literally carpet-bombs all procedural safeguards and tolerates an unprecedented infrastructure of vigilantism.
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