Cover Story

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO COVER Chor Bizarre

some weeks ago, a man named Lokendra Pratap Singh invited the media to a film screening at the Lucknow Press Club. Claiming to be a TV producer from Mumbai, he said he had made a film on the life and death of Phoolan Devi, the bandit-turned-MP who was murdered in the summer of 2001. As Lucknow's perennially gossip-seeking journalists watched the show, they found a portly politician telling his party president that it would be electorally advantageous to "get rid" of Phoolan even though she was a colleague. Their resemblance to the two most important men in the Samajwadi Party (SP) was obvious.

PRESIDENTIAL-STYLE RACE: Mulayam (top) and Rajnath have in effect reduced a complex polity to a personal duel

Having shown his little film, Mr Singh promptly disappeared. To much of his audience though he had already done his job-make an allegation the BJP would have loved to. Phoolan was after all a Mallah, a "lower" OBC and part of the Most Backward Castes (MBCs) that the BJP has been trying to wean away from the Yadav-led SP.

Welcome to Uttar Pradesh, the world's most treacherous, confusing and downright diabolical polity. On February 14, 18 and 21, it votes for its new Assembly to choose between, in essence, Rajnath Singh of the BJP and Mulayam Singh Yadav of the SP, to decide in a larger reckoning the stability of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime in Delhi.

In the old days, Uttar Pradesh politics was horrifically complex with a simple solution. There were the usual caste divisions and multicornered contests and factionalism.
The Congress, however, managed to win seats by getting only 40 odd per cent of the vote. It had a solid chunk of Brahmins, Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits behind it and usually scraped through as the first past the post.

Shysters, crooks and plain crazies: the poll tamasha

POLITICS, COW-BELT STYLE: Pathak (above) has invested family savings on a BSP ticket; Raja Bhaiyya (centre) and his symbol are all you can see in Kunda

The BJP has tried to replicate the formula. Unfortunately, its core vote stops at 25-30 per cent. The threshold is lower than the Congress'. A minor deviation here, a small shift there and victory quickly turns to defeat. Hence the fight for every caste group and sub-caste group, the gotra-level politics. Hence the need to woo MBCs, Jats, Thakurs, Chamars, Dhobis, anybody, everybody.

Amid all the confusion there is a reassurance-if that is the word-about who the next chief minister of Uttar Pradesh is going to be. It's a game of bluff between Rajnath and Mulayam, with Mayawati being the perennial joker in the pack.

For the BJP, the election is crucial beyond cliches. Vajpayee is an MP from Uttar Pradesh and has overseen its politics, replacing Kalyan Singh with Ram Prakash Gupta in 1999, only to have Rajnath take over as chief minister in October 2000. At that point, the BJP was on the ropes. While Rajnath brought some order to the administration-he says he has announced 700 schemes in his 14 months as chief minister and implemented 692-it was just never going to be enough. Over four years in power, the BJP organisation had fattened and become lethargic. State unit chief Kalraj Mishra and Rajnath were at daggers drawn, Brahmin versus Thakur, chief minister wannabe versus chief minister.

Organising secretaries-the steel frame as it were of the BJP-were accused of everything from bribery to running patronage networks. The OBCs were unhappy with clansman Kalyan's removal. The cadre was sulking. Life was a mess. If the BJP is in the race at all today, credit has to be given to Rajnath who has conveyed the image of a decisive leader. In a sense, and the Aaj Tak-C-Voter opinion poll bears this out, Rajnath is more popular than the BJP.

To be fair, the party too is in slightly better shape than it was a year ago; whether this will be enough to win requisite seats is another matter. In July 2001, a worried central leadership sent Kushabhau Thakre, former BJP president, to Lucknow with a one-line brief: get the factions to stop fighting.

While Rajnath went about organising panchayats-of teachers, traders, farmers, you name it-and making promises as if they were going out of fashion, temporary migrant Thakre began a quiet rationalisation of the party office on Lucknow's Vidhan Sabha Marg. As a party functionary gushes, "Give him his due. At 82, he has travelled from Ghaziabad in the west to Gorakhpur in the east."

"Some 50 RSS men from Madhya Pradesh," a senior partyman says, "have fanned out into Uttar Pradesh districts." Their primary task is data collection and feedback. The comatose state BJP unit, which didn't even have a database on caste domination in constituencies, has been simply overwhelmed. Kalraj's meddlesome personal secretaries, Vijay Pathak and Virendra Tiwari, have been banished from the party HQ and sent off to fight elections.
Pathak, a party official grins, "is standing from Nizamabad, Azamgarh, a seat the BJP
has never won".