Uttar Pradesh

The pointed finger of Ambedkar statues symbolically conveys the meaning of lecturing, or teaching the nation about democracy and fraternity. The politics of proliferating Dalit iconography is one of seeking visibility and asserting one’s right to access public spaces. However, clashes routinely erupt over such iconography given the upper castes’ fear of their threatened hegemony.

From adopting winnability as the core principle of nominating candidates to removing political appointees of the previous government, and in dealing with governments of opposition parties, the behaviour of the Bharatiya Janata Party has been so much like the Congress that the latter would rejoice in the assurance that there is no mukti from its ways and manners. The crucial difference between the BJP and other parties is that it is able to instil a sense of destiny not just among its rank and file but also the general public and convince it that the party is doing desh seva while others have been doing only politics.

The Bharatiya Janata Party consolidated the support of the “leftover” castes such as the Gujjar, Tyagi, Brahmin, Saini and Kashyap who are not counted in the typical matrix fashioned for years on the basis of the “dominant” groupings like the Jats, Muslims and Dalits. Accompanying the mathematics were a slew of ideas about Muslims and Yadavs as oppressors, and a strategic silence so as to not polarise all Muslim votes to benefit the BSP.

C S Verma (verma.cs@gmail.com) is a senior fellow and Shivani Singh (ssshivani15@gmail.com) is a research associate at the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow. Alok Ranjan (alokranjancmc@ gmail.com) is a junior research fellow at the Indian Council of Medical Research and T Sundararaman (sundar2016@gmail.com) teaches at the School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Significant interregional development disparities plaguing Uttar Pradesh today are often attributed to its large and unwieldy size. There is a strong prima facie case for the division of the state into smaller units to improve governance and development. But the demand for the state’s division, raised from time to time by all major parties except the Samajwadi Party, has presently receded into the background in the absence of mass support for it from any region. In the political discourse surrounding the 2017 UP assembly elections, it appears unlikely that restructuring of the state into manageable units will emerge as a significant issue.