On The spot
Tavleen Singh
If there are any of you out there who still have not understood why there was such a tsunami in favour of Narendra Modi in our largest state then you need only to have paid attention to what the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh said on Tuesday. Accompanied as he always is by a small army of minders or uncles Akhilesh Yadav declared on national television that his state was being wrongly targeted in the matter of atrocities against women. He then proceeded to list statistics of rape cases in other states. In this he was clearly following the lead of his uncle, Shivpal Yadav, who immediately after the horrific rape and hanging of those two young girls in Badaun said proudly that in proportionate terms women in Uttar Pradesh were safer than they were in other states. So now rape is to be measured in degrees and the victims of rape in U.P. can comfort themselves with the thought that many more women are being raped in Madhya Pradesh.
The Yadav family has produced men so totally lacking in compassion and basic humanity that they almost certainly did not notice that the message they sent with their insensitive comments was that rape was bad but it was not such a big crime that so much fuss need be made over it. When this message gets translated to young monsters of the kind who did what they did in Badaun what comes through is that it is all right to go ahead and find their next victims. Ever since the mighty patriarch of the Yadavs, Mulayam Singh, justified rape some months ago on the grounds that boys will be boys and therefore may make mistakes the number of rape cases from U.P. seems to have grown exponentially. And, each one is more horrific, more shaming, than the last. So in the Yadav patriarch’s own constituency, Azamgarh, the mother of a rape victim was stabbed and critically wounded for daring to seek justice. From Bareilly we heard of a woman who was forced to drink acid after she was gang-raped and most recently came news from Aligarh of a woman judge being raped. Such horrors are inevitable in a state in which high officials justify crime. In Badaun when VVIP political leaders started arriving in their helicopters other parents of rape victims arrived to try and draw their attention to their own untold horror stories. The only people who listened were reporters.
During the election campaign I traveled in Uttar Pradesh a lot and everywhere I went I met people who told me that since Akhilesh Yadav took charge two years ago the law and order situation had deteriorated seriously. They said that when Mayawati was Chief Ministers she made sure that gangsters and other criminals were locked up and this had brought crime down sharply but no sooner were the Yadavs back in power than the gangsters were back in business.
One big reason why we are likely to see the demise of the Samajwadi Party when elections are next held to the U.P. state assembly is exactly because of this but also because in the name of representing the interests of other backward castes this caste-based political party has allowed its OBC supporters to think of themselves as above the law. And, it has positioned Yadav officers and policemen in important offices so that they can be relied on to view Yadav criminals with indulgence. In Badaun when the desperate families of the two girls tried to get police help the Yadav policemen first asked what caste they were and refused to register a case when they discovered they were Dalits.
If that is not a sign of a deep, terminal sickness it is hard to say what is. What is interesting is that the same indulgence of gangsters and other criminals is the reason why Laloo Yadav, another mighty caste chieftain, had to face the humiliating defeat in this election of his wife and daughter. Nitish Kumar has done little by way of development in Bihar but what he has succeeded in doing is impose the rule of law. In Laloo’s time, people told me, there were gangsters who took shelter in the Chief Minister’s house after committing their crimes.
So why have political leaders like Mulayam and Laloo survived for more than two decades? Of course by indulging openly in politics based on divisions of caste and creed but there is another reason and that is that at the national level they have been supported by Leftist political leaders and intellectuals. When these gentlemen first arrived in Delhi in the early nineties as chief ministers of U.P. and Bihar they were treated as heroes on the grounds that they were ‘secular’ and so could do no wrong. This encouraged them to see themselves in as knights in shiny armour against ‘cummunal phorces’ and sadly it was the people of their states who paid the price for this. In careful imitation of the Congress Party they clothed themselves in the robes of secularism every time they were charged with incompetence and criminal governance. And, because they usually succeeded in luring Muslims into their fold by promises of secularism their caste base had an extra pillar. Even in this election when a Modi tsunami was sweeping caste-based parties out of the race I met Muslims who said that they did not want development if they could have secularism. The riots in Muzaffarnagar had put them off the Samajwadi Party but they were ready to give Mayawati another chance. Clearly not enough of a chance though since she ended up without a single seat in the 16th Lok Sabha.
It is too early to write the obituaries of caste politics in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but what seems to be becoming clear to ordinary voters is that it is time to see them in a new light. The recent spate of horrific rape cases may not have put the last nail in the coffin of the Samajwadi Party but it would be fair to say that it could be the second last. Personally I am prepared to write the obituary of Akhilesh Yadav even if he remains Chief Minister for another two years. When he goes he will be remembered in history as one of the worst chief ministers ever to rule an Indian state. The sooner he goes the better it will be for Uttar Pradesh.
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