The wooing game begins in UP

The captains of Indian industry have lambasted the UPA government for its policy paralysis. Prior to that the aam admi (read urban, middle-class India, as the real aam admi has no pipeline to articulate his views in the media) had rallied behind Anna Hazare in his anti-corruption crusade. That is, before Team Anna members started shooting off their mouths or shooting themselves in the foot.

This gigantic churn in ultra-rich/ upper middle-class India is slowly but surely leading up to the million-dollar question on the next government. Even before UPA II reaches its mid-term mark, it is looking like a listless, rudderless ship adrift mid-sea, with no destination in mind or sight. Of course, the ultimate pot of honey that every politician worth his/her salt is eyeing is success in the 2014 Lok Sabha General Election. But before that goalpost can be approached, there are two other issues to be resolved

The first pertains to the heightened level of expectation and gossip in the Capital, particularly the Congress Party, about when , rather than whether , Rahul Gandhi would be crowned party chief. The other, and more important, issue pertains to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections due next year.

The irrepressible UP Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati, who has got entangled in as many corruption charges as the number of statues — of humans and elephants — her government has put up all over India's biggest State, has fired the first salvo.

Wooing Brahmins

On Sunday, addressing a Brahmin sammelan in Lucknow, she made an unveiled attempt to woo UP's Brahmin vote, which is upward of 10 per cent in many constituencies and can make a difference between victory and defeat. Through her famous social engineering formula that capitalised on both Dalit and upper-caste/Brahmin votes, she had managed to sweep the UP Assembly polls in 2007. Remember the heady slogan, referring to the Bahujan Samaj Party's symbol elephant… “ Haathi nahi Ganesh hei, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hei ”?

Wooing and getting the vote of the Brahmin segment, which was disenchanted with both the Congress and the BJP — the parties that had traditionally got this vote — was her trump card in 2007. But UP's shrewd Bahenji failed to rework this magic in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, where the fresh-faced Rahul Gandhi, helped by sister Priyanka Vadra's abundant charm and dynamism, managed to get the Congress an unbelievable 21 Lok Sabha seats.

But Rahul's charm offensive in UP clearly belongs to the past. There is no denying that in recent times his magic has waned as more and more people have lost patience with the Congress Yuvraj (as Mayawati loves to call him) failing to emerge out of probation and reveal some real leadership skills.

With there continuing to be a question mark against Ms Sonia Gandhi's health status, as the nation is yet to get a comprehensive health bulletin on the country's most powerful woman, and with the image of UPA II tarnished and dented by scams galore, Ms Mayawati has been first off the mark with her strategy for the 2012 UP election.

Electoral hyperbole

Akin to a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, she pulled out the BSP's Brahmin card — good old Satish Chandra Mishra. Suddenly, not only did the man she had sidelined in recent times come in handy, but also his sisters and their “great contribution” to the BSP. She reminded the well-attended sammelan how she had rewarded Mishra-ji's sisters by making one chairperson of the UP Women's Commission and the other a member of the State Human Rights Commission.

The astute politician went one step ahead; zeroing in on the traditional upper-class rivalry between UP's Brahmins and Thakurs, the Dalit diva lit a post-Diwali firecracker. If the Brahmin vote helped the BJP to come to power in UP, their Chief Minister would be Rajnath Singh, a Thakur.

If they helped the Congress get the Lucknow gaddi , the Party had plans to make Digvijay Singh the UP chief minister, she thundered, knowing fully well that this would be a doubly bitter dose for UP's Brahmins to swallow. Digvijay is not only an outsider but also a Thakur!

Reminding us once again of the ridiculous levels to which men stoop when they report to an extremely powerful female boss, and reminiscent of Ms J. Jayalalithaa's unquestioned supremacy in the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, Brahmin leaders within the BSP described Ms Mayawati as a “goddess of justice with divine powers”!

Moving over from divine beings to mere mortals, along with the Brahmin vote, another vital key to the Lucknow throne is the Muslim vote.

THE Muslim vote

Mr Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party emerged a weak third in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, mainly because the Muslim vote walked away from him back to the Congress, with the BSP also getting a fair share of it. But initial trends from Lucknow show that Mulayam is inching back, as far as the UP Muslim is concerned, toward the good old days when he was affectionately known as Maulana Mulayam.

Take any region, caste or community, the disenchantment of the voters with the ruling classes, who always fail to meet their expectations or aspirations, is complete. And so, like a pendulum, they switch their allegiance. Tamil Nadu has seen this trend right from 1991.

The Muslims of UP are no different. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, they had moved away from the Congress, holding the Narasimha Rao government at the Centre responsible for the crime. But Mulayam's Samajwadi Party couldn't hold on to them very long and in the 2009 Lok Sabha poll they saw some hope in the young Rahul Gandhi…. the suave, soft-spoken man who could so comfortably display Lucknow's famous tameez and tehzeeb , particularly when juxtaposed against his cousin Varun Gandhi spewing venom on Muslims.

But from 2009 to 2012 is a long journey, and local political analysts see Mulayam winning back a substantial share of the Muslim vote.

With the fourth player, the BJP, showing every indication that it won't remain No 4 in 2012, as the Congress, which is leading the UPA II, is working so hard for that position, we'll see an extremely interesting election in UP in the coming year.

(Response may be sent to blfeedback@thehindu.co.in and rasheeda@thehindu.co.in )

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