Understanding the state of UP

From Lucknow to Lutyens: The power and plight of Uttar Pradesh

Author: Abhigyan Prakash

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 239

Price: Rs 599

You need no special expertise to divine that Uttar Pradesh (UP) is a crucial element in Indian politics.  The state sends the largest complement of MPs to the two Houses of Parliament. It employs the largest number of IAS officers. It is a small country. Its population is the size of Brazil. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said as much when he said Brazil had suffered 65,000 deaths because of Covid-19 but UP saw 800. “It means many lives have been saved in the state,” he observed in 2020. Whether the death toll was indeed 800 and so many needed to have died at all is another matter. The aab-o-hava (culture) of the state, its dialects, even eating habits, are very different in different regions. The short point is, there is no template for understanding UP, much less its politics.

In this context, Abhigyan Prakash’s book is an ambitious undertaking, even if the title is a bit misleading. From Lucknow to where? One has to presume he’s referring to Lutyens’ Delhi. And the power of UP is self-evident. But the plight? The state is the seat of political power, and even Mr Modi had to acknowledge that when he decided to contest the Lok Sabha elections from UP rather than his home state, Gujarat. On many socio-economic indices, UP fares no better and no worse than other states of India. So why should we feel more for UP? Mr Prakash can be forgiven for giving voice to anguish: He is a UP boy, born in Varanasi, growing up in Lucknow. It is not hard to visualise him looking around him, spotting the potential in UP and wondering why the state hasn’t made more of itself. And that’s where the book loses its way.

It has some outstanding chapters.  Mr Prakash’s research on the caste-based criminal gangs of UP explains the connections between caste/religion, economic deprivation, criminalisation and political legitimisation. It provides the context for the rise of a Vikas Dubey, Phoolan Devi, and Nirbhay Singh Gujjar. It also explains the rise of trans-national crime syndicates like the one headed by Abu Salem, the noted don who operated from Azamgarh, later Dubai and Europe. Mr Prakash says central to the rise of Salem’s network was the telecom revolution in the 1990s and the phone booths that mushroomed all over India but especially in remote places in UP. These enabled him to keep in touch via untraceable calls to gang members operating in Azamgarh and beyond.

Nirbhay Singh Gujjar, Mr Prakash says, was the first dacoit in the Bundelkhand region to use cell phones and SIM cards for his operations — which in the early 1990s still cost up to ~14 a minute per call.  Gujjar was possibly the first to subcontract kidnapping and extortion to satellite gangs for a small “commission”. Interestingly, Mr Prakash says, Gujjar abducted many women and even married three of them, but “they all ran away with other men”, the last being his 20-year old wife Neelam who eloped with his foster son!  Gujjar also devised the concept of a dacoit panchayat. His disclosure that he had a political relationship with Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav embarrassed the leader so much that he ordered the Special Task Force against Gujjar who was hunted and gunned down in 2005.

But Mr Prakash has not dwelt enough on one of the reasons for the politician-criminal nexus in UP. Take Ghazipur, a district he has mentioned in his book. The rot began in the 1970s and 1980s when the Union government began pumping in funds for the infrastructure development of eastern UP and Lucknow and sold the contracts to local heavies. Mukhtar Ansari and Afzal Ansari entered politics through the Bahujan Samaj Party, having battened on licences and quotas, and when one of their gang members, Brijesh Singh, fell out with them, a war broke out that had nothing to do with religion but willy-nilly, took on religious overtones. The murder of BJP legislator Krishnanand Rai in 2005 revealed the seamy underbelly of a corner of India that saw no actual development, high unemployment, and an economy based on extortion and the drugs trade. There is no UP without Ayodhya; and there is no Ayodhya without LK Advani. Mr Prakash notes the horrific aftermath of the Rath Yatra and the demolition, but in the manner of a dispassionate reporter, also chronicles the “political brilliance” of Mr Advani who, he says, was the one who effaced the line between religion and politics and declared the BJP’s official support to the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. This was initially a purely tactical move but became the national political issue that no party could dare to ignore.
 

Despite being a bit thin on research on some aspects, this book, very much a reporter’s account, is extremely helpful in understanding what UP was —and how it has evolved.