How does India’s most populous state perceive itself? How do these self-images—vivid and paradoxical—impact its polity and polls, and more importantly, Indian democracy? Why couldn’t the lower castes’ movement in the state, which saw the surge of OBC politics and made a Dalit woman chief minister, dampen the majoritarian temple movement? These questions may offer a few clues towards decoding the ongoing elections in Uttar Pradesh, where a mosque that barely existed in the cultural memory of Mathura has become an electoral issue, and a Dalit family in Hathras is forced to cast their vote under heavy security.
To begin with, most residents of UP barely have the sense of belonging to the entire province that is so often seen in other states. Let alone the cultural and linguistic exclusiveness of non-Hindi speaking states—like Kerala, West Bengal and Assam—even residents of Hindi-speaking states have a distinct identity—Haryanvi, Bihari, Chhattisgarhia, Jharkhandi. Residents of UP primarily carry the regional identities of Purvanchali, Awadhi and Ruhelkhandi, but rarely a singular, monolithic image. Even the often-used term in public discourse, Western UP, is a mere geographical convenience and signifies little cultural bonding. Agra and Shamli are technically in Western UP, but Agra’s kinship mostly remains with the other towns of the Brij region, like Mathura and Hathras.
But when it comes to elections, many residents from Muzaffarnagar to Mirzapur carry an extraordinary smugness of being the kingmakers. The voters of the ‘Hindi heartland’, they believe, decide the next prime minister. Such residents include even Professor Harish Trivedi who, with a degree from Allahabad University, began teaching at St. Stephen’s at the age of 22 before going to England for a doctorate on Virginia Woolf. “Yes, I grew up taking great pride in UP for many reasons. First and foremost, a local lad was the prime minister of India for the first seventeen years of the independent nation (and also my life), and was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi. For us, the PM’s post seemed to be ghar ke kheti or a pocket borough,” he tells Outlook. Trivedi names several successive incumbents before underlining that even Narendra Modi is “technically” from UP.
The smugness has obvious implications. A state that sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha—the next, Maharashtra, has a mere 48—is almost always seen aiming at Delhi durbar, with little time for itself. “No UP chief minister, except for a few accidental ones like Chandra Bhanu Gupta, have stayed with their heels dug in, with a new vision for recreating the state. They always have an eye on the Red Fort,” veteran writer and journalist Mrinal Pande tells Outlook. Such is the electoral power that public projection of a UP CM begins before they become a national figure. In their initial years as chief minister, a discourse had emerged about Mayawati and Yogi Adityanath as future prime ministers—perhaps, even before they saw themselves as a potential candidate. It affects the state in several ways. “If the chief minister is thinking more about Delhi, all their decisions are with an eye on Delhi. People don’t feel attached to their CMs in the way people of other states feel,” Pande adds.
Since these politicians identify themselves with national politics, they tend to abandon the ideological moorings that had brought them to power in UP. “Mayawati and Mulayam won elections as representatives of marginalised communities of UP. But they dropped their ideological stands and began talking in a different political idiom,” Lucknow-based senior Hindi writer Virendra Yadav says. The lack of a distinct state identity also ensures that the polity, divided in regional frames, is rarely united. Retired IAS officer Anil Swarup of the UP cadre shares his experiences of deputations at the Centre. “When I was posted in Delhi, politicians of various states came to Delhi together with a common cause. The left and the right parties in Kerala frequently fight, but they approach Delhi with a shared concern,” he says. “But people from UP came for their local issues, and not for the larger cause of the state.” A state that lives with a self-image of being “mini-India”, to use Swarup’s words, often finds itself unable to come to a common ground at the national level.
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Yadav sees an illusion in the ‘pan-Indian identity’. Perhaps, no illusion seems bigger than the state being the flagbearer of the ‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzib’— a poetic allusion to the fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures—that might have been a truth earlier, but is now visible only in isolated instances. The political project of forging a Hindu-Muslim unity often ignored the fact that the communal divide existed in many parts of the state long before L.K. Advani launched his Rath Yatra.
Soon after independence, the state assembly of the United Provinces began discussing a new name for the province. Gyanesh Kudasiya, in his book Region, Nation, Heartland: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic, mentions that among the 20 suggestions that the UP cabinet received were Aryavarta, Brahmvarta, Brahmadesh, Krishna Kaushal Province and Ram Krishna Prant. The UP polity had taken a decisive turn soon after independence but it was rarely noticed. Kudasiya points out that under the watch of UP’s first CM Govind Ballabh Pant, the state metamorphosed into the ‘Hindi heartland’ and Urdu was attacked for “being anti-national in its home ground”. “We underestimate the kind of anti-minority prejudice Govind Ballabh Pant brought to the job, as well as the active de-Muslimisation of administration. UP had, at best, electoral secularism, which is now dissipating,” says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “Electoral secularism was always a fragile coalition without deep cultural roots,” he says, citing the instance of Charan Singh who was “intensely communal, but electorally secular”.
UP was a major site of the freedom movement, the bastion of Hindi and Urdu literature, a stronghold of Muslim politics, as well as the seat of great universities of Allahabad, Aligarh and Banaras. The non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements saw the maximum number of arrests from UP. The area was known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh since 1902, and was shortened to United Provinces in 1937. Jawaharlal Nehru in Discovery of India termed the United Provinces “the heart of India”, “the seat of the old Hindi culture as well as of Persian culture”, which later “intermingled with the culture of the west”.
The education institution have collapsed and the glorious past has been replaced by a strong anti-Muslim sentiment that has intensified in recent years. The mosque in Mathura offers a bigger example than Ayodhya’s. The Ram temple in Ayodhya was a dilapidated one, but an imposing Krishna temple stands in Mathura surrounded by a number of glistening shops and hotels. In absolute contrast is the neglected mosque whose approach lane is swathed in filth, around which live impoverished Muslim families. The mosque was a non-entity in the ecosystem around the temple, as well as in the holy town of Mathura, which is said to have more temples than its lanes. And yet, residents have now begun demanding the removal of the mosque that barely stirred their cultural memory.
The sentiment has to a great extent been enabled by a perception that the SP rule patronised Muslim criminals. Praveen Kumar, a Jatav worker at a brick factory on the Meerut-Shamli border, says that his vote will go to Mayawati, but quickly adds that “no one can deny that the Modi government ended the hooliganism of Muslims”. Travelling for the elections, one finds that ‘improvement’ in law and order during Yogi’s rule is a prevailing theme across the state. But the data may offer some other truths. National Crime Record Bureau records show that the state reported 8,900 riots in 2017; 8,908 in 2018, 5,714 in 2019 and 6,126 in 2020—less than 8,018 cases in 2016 during the Samajwadi Party, but still substantial numbers. In 2021, the National Commission for Women received 31,000 complaints of crimes against women, with 15,828 or over a half of them, from Uttar Pradesh.
The number of cases registered for crime against women between 2013 and 2016 was 1,56,634, which increased to 2,24,694 in the first three years of the Yogi government in 2017-2020. In the first three years of the Yogi government, nearly 37 per cent of people killed in police “encounters” were Muslims, according to data released by the state government.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to the perception about the law and order situation is the family of the Hathras rape victim in Boolgarhi village. Earlier pressured by the administration to drop the case, her brothers and parents have been living with simmering fear. They are among the few Dalit families in the village dominated by Thakurs. Ever since they raised their voice against the Thakur brothers accused of gangrape in September 2020, they began receiving threats, and soon a platoon of CRPF was deployed for their security. “We have been imprisoned here for over a year now. We go out only for court hearings or to buy medicines, always with CRPF security,” says one of the family members. People in the village throw garbage, dead rats and pups at their home. On February 20, some 12-15 CRPF men accompanied them as they went to cast their vote.
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There’s another factor that defines UP’s politics. The deep resentment the Hindi establishment is living with; resentment not only against English, but also against various Indian languages because they resist the status of the ‘national language’ to Hindi. With its politics aimed against ‘intellectuals’, the BJP has perfectly exploited the sentiment of the Hindi-speaking population who increasingly find themselves sidelined by the English elite.
The past glory of the state is now over. Trapped in its self-image, UP needs a new cultural-political imagination, as well as a literary surge of Hindi. Virendra Yadav notes that the “Savarna idiom” of caste politics must also change. When Mayawati made a different interpretation of her election symbol—that “Hathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai (It’s not the elephant, it’s Ganesh, as well as Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh)”—she effectively abandoned the prime marker of the party’s identy and associated herself with the very values she had once stood against. The political compulsions of expanding the voter base ensured that the original movement of lower castes collapsed, allowing the BJP to fill the space. Sarvesh Ambedkar joined the BSP in 1986 and left after three long decades in 2016. He is now contesting the assembly elections on an SP ticket from Kayamganj, Farrukhabad. “Mayawati’s ship sank because she tried to incorporate both the lion and the goat,” he says, reminding that “Kanshi Ram had said: Tilak, taraju aur talwar, inse raho abhi hoshiyar (Be cautious of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas). Behanji embraced the upper castes before preparing her own people.”
Precisely therefore, even if the BJP is unable to form the government in March, the social structure may not see any major change. “Even if SP wins, if they don’t change their Savarna idiom, they won’t be able to bring any deeper change, and nobody will be able to stop the politics going the Hindutva way,” says Yadav. Be it the unemployed youth in Raebareli, the sugarcane farmer of Muzaffarnagar or the family in Agra that was devastated by the pandemic, social reality demands a change but political leadership seems unable to meet the challenge. But who can provide leadership to a state whose vast geography and staggeringly diverse culture challenge the prospects of any political or social reform movement? Indeed, when she was the chief minister, Mayawati had proposed to divide the state into four. “No coalition can do justice to the immense contradictions UP’s size produces. What Eastern UP needs is different from the West and Bundelkhand,” says Mehta. A massive electoral power deposited in a single state that can’t be accountable even to its own citizens is hardly a healthy signal for democracy.
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Amid this, a short story, Poos Ki Raat, that Premchand wrote a century ago entered the electoral discourse in this January. The protagonist, farmer Halku, goes to safeguard his crop from stray cattle on a winter night. Unable to bear the frost, he lights a fire and dozes off before waking up in the morning, only to find his crop completely damaged. The cattle menace has returned in Uttar Pradesh, causing unrest among farmers and becoming an electoral issue.
On February 22 in Raebareli, Vijay Prakash Chaudhary, himself a farmer, narrated an incident to this reporter. A month ago in Itwa village of Raebareli, brothers Shivram and Tulsi were on their farmland one night, protecting their crop from stray cattle. The two didn’t survive the bone-chilling January winter; their bodies were found the next morning. Chaudhary was fuming as he narrated the incident. Great literature often writes the future, but even Premchand couldn’t have anticipated the death of the two farmers a century later.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Heartland Heartburn")
