Intertwined: The Destinies Of India, Uttar Pradesh, And BJP

The nation’s most populous province, Uttar Pradesh, is finally on the rise. Swanky new expressways have replaced pitted, rutted roads. Great pilgrimage centres have been revived, boosting devotional travel by orders of magnitude. Aesthetically-built railway stations have replaced the squalor that was. 

Investments are pouring in. A sprawling, interlinked defence corridor is coming up at multiple places in the state; in swift time, it will become a massive manufacturing hub.

Spending capacity is visibly up, as is spending (both rural and urban), forcing the state to zoom up the tax collection charts.

That old, cliched image of Uttar Pradesh as a poor, backward, rural state, bedevilled by mafia dons, corruption, and communal riots, is now mercifully making way for one, which, positions it as one of the prime movers of the nation’s economy well before this decade is up.

However, this change has come about only in the past decade, and only following the paradigmatic political upheavals which saw the advent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the centre first, in 2014, and then at the state level, in 2017.

Both Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath have worked in tandem, at high political cost, to ensure that both law and order and the state’s infrastructure are honed to absorb investment and growth.

Much of that political cost has been by way of welfare schemes which offer residents a sense of security and modernisation.

Toilets, tap water or cooking gas may not seem revolutionary for the more industrialised and prosperous states of the union, like Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra, just as education of the girl child or sanitation attracts little awe in states with high human development indices like Kerala.

But Uttar Pradesh is like none of these states, by no metric, and it is the bald truth that the only way this state has been dragged, kicking and screaming out of decrepitude, is through focus on development by a ‘double-engine sarkar’.

It needed that; there was no other way, as 65 sorry years of otiose secularism have shown. At long last, a weighty millstone is being forcefully refashioned as the resolute keystone of a new arch.

What does that mean in political terms, because, lest we forget, this is India, where, in the end, everything invariably boils down to winning elections?

There are multiple ways of looking at this.

First, it is imperative that the BJP secure their popular mandate at both the centre and the state for at least one more election cycle. Uttar Pradesh is too heavily on the cusp to brook retrogressive results which flip the momentum back from progress to the past.

That may seem like a flagrantly-biased comment, but it is the truth. For over a century now, much of the subcontinent’s ills have been the ills of Uttar Pradesh, projected and amplified upon the national exchequer as a dying demand for serial subventions which stave off socio-economic disaster for over 200 million people directly, and a billion-odd more indirectly.

The pie doesn’t grow as fast as the Uttar Pradesh slice does. In other words, in a resource-constrained, agriculture-heavy economy like ours, history shows that any attempt to treat budgetary deficits in a cavalier fashion, or printing rupees like there is no tomorrow, only leads to wildly counterproductive inflation which sets us back by a decade.

This is the code which the BJP has finally cracked. Whether we call it a civilisational awakening or a supra-caste consolidation, is merely a matter of detail (perhaps, it is a bit of both too); the bottom line is that a vital political message has gotten through to a remarkably large number of people in the Gangetic plains; a message of trust, that, if the people of Uttar Pradesh are willing to trust the BJP, the party will deliver in spades.

Second, the proof of that pudding is in its eating. Statistics matter, and it is the simplest ones which shake us out of our stereotype-driven stupor.

As unearthly as it may sound, Uttar Pradesh, a land-locked state, now produces as much fish as Kerala does! If the reader balks in disbelief, here is the latest data from the Reserve Bank of India:

And it isn’t just Rohu which trumps Karimeen. After some rocky years, dominated by unwieldy growth in different parts of the country, and the rigors of a pandemic, Uttar Pradesh’s contribution to value addition from manufacturing is now growing steadily, at a healthy clip.

For comparison, and because our secularist brethren frequently sing hosannas to a hoary ‘Kerala model’, note how Kerala’s share has been declining since 2018 in the chart below.

If we compare gross state domestic product (GSDP), we see that the GSDP of Uttar Pradesh has started growing at a distinctly faster rate since 2015, when the first half of a double-engine Sarkar fell into place.

In contrast, Kerala’s GSDP has been wearily stagnating since 2018. We can go on, but the point is made.

Third, at a macro, political level, the problem (If we can use this term) for the BJP is that it would need to increase its vote base in Uttar Pradesh to around 60 per cent, if it is to maintain the current momentum, and see the job through over the next two or three election cycles.

At the parliamentary level, its vote share rose to 50 per cent in 2019, and is expected to cross 55 per cent in 2024, but that is not enough.

The party will need to factor in an element of disenchantment from some sections of the state’s society over time, and the continued hindrances of that identity vote which still refuses to place development over divisive ideologies.

This electoral sine qua non yawns wider at the provincial level, where the BJP, along with a few smaller allies, polled ‘only’ about 44 per cent in 2022.

The basic point is that the change being forced requires a hefty popular mandate if it is not to fall victim to the vicissitudes of regional politics (meaning, inter alia, that no one can take the voter for granted, since that is what the Congress did for decades, and see where they are now?).

However, fourth, at an elemental level, it is rather reassuring to see in Uttar Pradesh, today, that there is no dichotomy between saying “Jai Shri Ram” and “Sabka saath sabka vikas” in the same breath.

It is the new-found confidence which the BJP is capitalising upon: pride in one’s ethos or way of life is increasingly being recognised in the state, particularly by youngsters, as complimentary to pride in progress. 

This is the new Uttar Pradesh, and it is important for the BJP to ensure that such heady sentiments are corralled and channelised to become second nature; vital, in fact, since in the progress of Uttar Pradesh lies India’s path to prosperity in this ‘Amrit Kaal’.