The Test Of A New Track

In 2013, west-central Uttar Pradesh threw a paradox in a country where it isn’t unusual for poor landholders to violently resist takeover moves for big projects. Protests erupted in an area earmarked to lay the showpiece Agra-Lucknow expressway—only that it was not against land acquisition. In sharp contrast, farmers were angry because their land was not being acq­uired, despite an earlier proposal. The 302-km zippy highway is now a dev­e­lopment mascot for UP’s poll-bound chief minister Akhilesh Yadav. The 43-year-old leader is seen pitching himself around economic transformation of India’s most populous state, rather than old-style politics based on caste and cron­yism. It’s a makeover that’s worrying rivals, particularly the BJP.

Remarkably, Akhilesh has managed to cut a different image for himself from that of his powerful dynastic party associated with feudal-style ruffian politics organised along sectarian lines. UP, with 21 crore people, actually stands on par with Brazil in terms of population. How far has the current CM turned things around in a state that still has the largest share of India’s extremely poor? And whose per capita income as a percentage of all-India per capita income has actually fallen to 40 per cent in 2014-15? This one statistic alone explains the development gap between UP and the country on the whole.

Emerging unscathed from a bitter political feud within his family, Akhilesh has just sewn up a seat-sharing pact with the Cong­ress. This too ups the game for him as much as it will help the Congress. The alliance, for one, is said to give Muslims a clear choice now to back Akhilesh’s Samajwadi Party. Two, it could help improve what, in view of increasingly fractious elections, matters most: ‘vote-share-to-seat’ conversion ratio. This means a lower vote-share can still give winning margins and add to the total if you get the right help from allies.

Akhilesh is “obviously building a perception around a big narrative of development,” says Badri Narayan Tiwari of Allahabad University, “although he will now have to get down to fixing the aspects of caste and Muslim votebanks. No escaping that.”

Yet, the scion of a powerful regional political dynasty, Yadav, has succeeded in putting a spin to his development agenda. The Lucknow Metro rail network—an aspirational acquisition of many cities—is another fancy project the CM has been personally monitoring. The proposed eight-lane Samajwadi Poorvanchal Expressway is another pet road project. Akhilesh’s most recent pre-election budget saw his biggest push to infrastructure, with the highest allocation in the past decade for hard infrastructure.

“In earlier elections, development was more piecemeal,” says Prof A.K. Verma of the Kanpur-based Centre for the Study of Society and Politics. “The development narrative was firmly set in 2014, when Modi gave it a generic texture. Akhilesh, being young and foreign-educated, could sense it. He took a serious note of it.”

However, the CM started late, unable to assert himself in the first two-three years over “shades within his party who are blatantly criminal”, as Verma put it. In fact, the first three years were horrible, says Delhi-based economist Ravi Srivastava of the JNU’s Centre for the Study of Regional Development, who has just completed a study on UP’s economic performance.

Throughout the 1990s, the Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party practised a brand of exclusivist politics, pulling off wins by consolidating caste-based social groupings such as Other Backward Castes and Dalits. But that had begun to run its course. Realising this, parties, particularly the BJP, began making cross-caste appeals. The state elections in 2007 saw the first real instance of “social engineering” in the guise of inclusive politics when Mayawati stomped home with sizeable votes of Brahmins, the social group conventionally slotted atop India’s caste hierarchy.

OBCs, or a clutch of agrarian castes, acco­unt for two-fifth of UP’s population. The BJP, treading a similar path of cross-caste strategy in the 2014 national elections, drew handsome support from the non-Yadav OBC groups, who make up 80 per cent of OBCs.

With simple caste-based appeals no longer enough to pull off wins, development began occupying a greater space. “It is clear that even the most backwards now desire development,” says Verma.

Yet, the state comes out pretty much at the bottom of all socio-economic indicators. To be sure, UP in the five years under Akh­ilesh, continues to lag on almost all para­meters of growth when compared to peer states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Bihar, for instance, has been able to consistently raise social-sector spe­nding between 2012 and 2015, unlike UP. And UP’s industrial growth lags all these three states by several notches. In fact, industrial expansion in UP has been the slowest. For instance, Bihar’s industrial growth in 2014-15 was 9%; UP’s was 1.9%.

Indeed, average state GDP growth in the previous Mayawati government’s tenure was higher than in Akhilesh’s.

So, what makes the present CM stand out as somebody on a development mission? While her 2007-12 regime did bring in investments, Mayawati did not have a distinctive model of economic overhaul. Akhilesh gave development a so-called template. What was that?

“He (Akhilesh) accelerated infrastructure programmes, but many of these were planned much earlier,” says Srivastava. “Basically, he created an infrastructure-led strategy with a twin focus. Expressways and an integrated profile for development around expressways, linked to urbanisation. That’s the spin.”

Poverty, however, remains entrenched. UP continues to have the highest share of India’s total population below the poverty line—at 22.17%. The state anyway has the highest share of marginalised groups, such as SCs (20.5%) and Muslim (22.34%). “Among comparable states, such as Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the comparable states are much better,” says Srivastava. “But yes, he (the CM) has shown some interest in development and has moved away from crony capitalism. It’s been much cleaner now.”

Large as it is, UP’s poverty profile is widely spread in about 50 districts and shows no change in the past five years. According to the state’s annual plan document, 15 districts remain abysmally poor. These are Jaunpur, Ballia, Lalitpur, Mau, Ghazipur, Bahraich, Maharajganj, Hardoi, Deoria, Azamgarh, Balrampur, Shrawasti, Kushi Nagar, SK Nagar and Mirzapur.

Economists say the CM is not doing anything “greatly innovative”. Social spending remains a problematic area. Yet, he has managed to overcome the messy problems of land acquisition because of a fairly robu­stly compensatory “Right to Fair Compen­sation, Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettle­ment Act” enacted in 2013. A less-noticed aspect is his Tamil Nadu-like welfarism-populism stra­tegy, which include the hugely popular laptop scheme of 2012, the Samajwadi Bima Yojana, a pension scheme, and Samaj­wadi Smartphone Yojana.

A big reason for timely completion of projects is the UP Expressways Industrial Development Authority, a special purpose vehicle. All this has given an imp­ression of keener implementation, if not massive successes. “His biggest success has been to break away from the shackles placed around him. He was able to manage a certain degree of autonomy,” Srivastava says, in a note of cautious optimism.