March 9, 1998

Give Uttar Pradesh a respite from its cussed politicians, give it President's rule

Tavleen Singh

It is important we see the past week's shenanigans in Uttar Pradesh with some kind of perspective. Before I give you the figures that would make such a perspective possible, two simple facts: India is among the 50 poorest countries and Uttar Pradesh is one of our two poorest, most benighted states. It can't afford politicians whose main purpose is to glue themselves to the chief minister's chair.

Now for some figures. State of the World's Children, a report UNICEF released in December 1997, tells us that half the world's malnourished children are Indian. It also tells us that whereas the worldwide percentage of malnourished children under the age of five is 37, in India it is 52. Globally, the under-five mortality rate is 88; in India it is 111. India also has 130 million people who still do not have access to safe drinking water and 720 million people who do not have access to sanitation.

You only have to travel briefly through Uttar Pradesh (and Bihar) to know it is in this part of India, the Hindi heartland, that we see these problems magnified into horrifying dimensions. The average Uttar Pradesh resident does not have anything that can be described as a standard of living. He ekes out a subsistence. In the state's more backward villages, the average family would live in a windowless hovel in which everyone would sleep on the mud floor. Everyone, including children as small as five, would need to work at whatever they could possibly do in order for the family to get one meal a day.

In all likelihood, the children would not be going to school. Girls would anyway be discouraged from school -- so that they could be married off at the earliest for there to be one mouth less to feed. And for one more woman to be available for breeding purposes so that Uttar Pradesh can continue to produce more children than any other state in India.

The real tragedy of Uttar Pradesh is that it does not have to be poor and could, with a proper government, quite quickly become one of our richest states. It has vast tracts of some of our best agricultural land. It has mountains, rivers, forests, more urban centres than any other state and limitless manpower. It also has the largest tourism potential in the country.

Every other foreign tourist is believed to visit the Taj Mahal but no state government has made the smallest effort to turn Agra into a major tourist centre. In fact you have only to step out of the Taj to forget its magic -- as you step over pigs and filth in a wretchedly poor village. In another country, these same people would have opened cafes, hotels and shops to cater to the tourists. The rest of Agra has been allowed to develop as if the words "planning" and "architecture" did not exist. So it resembles an interminable shanty town.

The state also has Uttarkashi, Devprayag, Rishikesh, Haridwar, Varanasi, Allahabad. So it could probably make as much money out of Indian pilgrims as from secular foreign tourists. Even without mentioning the state's hill stations and the medieval, one-trade towns like Khurja and Kannauj, it should be clear tourism on its own could bring prosperity.

It probably never will because Uttar Pradesh is cursed with politicians who are a national disgrace. They have been a disgrace since the days of Brahmin Congress chief ministers and they have gone rapidly downhill as Yadavs and Dalits have replaced them. The biggest failing of earlier Congress regimes was that they made only feeble attempts to tackle the state's most serious problems, like literacy, healthcare and sanitation. But in retrospect, we can credit them with at least keeping to the norms and decorum of public life. It was not usual in those days for MLAs to abuse each other in the Vidhan Sabha and, when that failed, to start throwing things at each other while on national television. Recall Kalyan Singh's vote of confidence in 1997.

The BJP, in some mistaken exercise in realpolitik, allowed Kalyan to gather together a collection of defectors and alleged criminals to form a coalition government in which all the newcomers were rewarded with ministries. This was done in the interests of giving Uttar Pradesh a "stable" government, which had the seeds of its doom implanted in the political behaviour of the new ministers. Pundits across the land gasped at the BJP's new realism while our secular political parties, united in their endeavour to "check communal forces at all costs", plotted and planned. So the ignominious ouster of Kalyan Singh was perhaps inevitable.

If Uttar Pradesh did not have enough problems already, it has also been landed with a governor who has even less time for constitutional norms than its politicians. Since he is "secular" to the core, he has appeared always to be on the side of the state's leading "secular" leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav. He swore in a new government with the haste one usually associates with criminal activity. The courts came to the rescue but not before Uttar Pradesh spent one night with the dubious privilege of having two chief ministers.

What a sordid, murky business Uttar Pradesh's politics has become. How very sad it is for the people of our largest state. Perhaps the only solution for the moment is President's rule -- with a decent man as governor.

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