Mayawati, Rahul and UP Ka Bhagya

It is hard to remember when UP had decent governance. I guess the downfall began after VP Singh became the UP CM back in 1980. After that there was a brief period where Kalyan Singh provided some semblance of governance. Since then BJP has had a couple of chances but those terms were disasters with the Kalyan Singh and Rajnath Singh failing to consolidate and build on their wins. Since 1980, most of the rule has been shared by Mulayam Singh and Mayawati. In that, UP has been as bad as Bihar and Bengal (those two states especially Bihar have since redeemed themselves). However, just like a woman suffering from an Abused Spouse Syndrome”, the UP voters keep electing one or the other. Fortunately for the voters, SP is now in tatters. That leaves Mayawati on top of this rotten heap of politicians jockeying for a slice of the UP pie.

Why is UP politics dirtier than other places? It is because UP is the biggest prize in Loksabha elections with more than 80 MP’s. No trick is dirty or sleazy enough to win this prize. In other states it often comes down to powerful communities but in UP it is pared down to the barest and ugliest form politics i.e. caste politics. Votebank politics is practiced in its lowest forms. Thanks to Mulayam Yadav and Samajwadi Party, some towns in western UP may as well be practicing the Sharia. Sleazy Muslim businessmen / crimelords (they either have slaughterhouses, selling meat to the middle east or tanneries turning the UP rivers and bodies of waters into a toxic brew. With large amounts of money, they have ensured status quo by any and all means. Politicians and their relatives are behaving like bad Bollywood movie villains.

Having lived in both UP and Gujarat, I know that the population in both the states is equally smart (Raj Thakrey can go and suck an egg). However, people of Gujarat did one thing right. They elected Narendra Modi. People of UP have been on a slippery slope, electing exact opposites of Narendra Modi. You go to Gujarat, You will see greenery, prosperity, hope but no pictures of Narendra Modi. You go to UP you will see desperation, poverty, crime and pictures of Mayawati everywhere. She is an egomaniac of the highest order who has food tasters, shoes flown in on private planes, private roads, immense amount of illegal wealth and reminders of her power and hold over UP’s fortunes everywhere. Only in the rule of someone like her can there be parks worth hundreds of crore rupees and paltry sums being doled out to fight disease epidemics. That park which is supposed to be a monument to dalit power is actually a thinly veiled monument to Kanshiram and Mayawati. I am sure that the dalits of UP would rather have those crores spent on economic opportunities or better infrastructure or hunger alleviation or anything that will have an impact on their quality of life. I fail to see how can you console a family saying “you may not have any hope or job or food or clothes or a place to live but you have a park celebrating the accomplishments of your fellow dalits. It would be ridiculous if it were not so cruel.

So why do we still have her around? Mayawati has mastered the art of social engineering. She has Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins. A curious collection indeed but she has them all fooled. Her group of MLAs is nothing short of who’s who of UP crime. All this is due to our own faults. Everywhere in India, I went, people would ask me my name. When I only told them my first name (which is clearly a Hindu name), they would insist on my last name. They are trying to figure out my caste or my home state. This is why Mayawati continues to rule UP. It is as if being Hindu is not enough.

Now Congress which has been wiped out from UP is trying to get back in and reclaim what used to be their votebank i.e. Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins. Rahul took padyatras, ate at farmer’s houses made claims about police atrocities in Bhatta Rasul and other stuff. When none of them worked, his handlers came up with another idea. Image makeover. This story is so ridiculous that it could only happen in India.

Accompanied by UP Congress President Rita Bahuguna Joshi and Union Minister of state for Rural Development Pradeep Jain , who himself hails from Bundelkhand, Rahul was passing through Mohda block of Hamirpur district when he intercepted a tractor-trolly loaded with DAP fertiliser. "No sooner the trio confronted the driver with certain queries, he confessed that the fertilizer was fake," UP congress spokesman Subodh Srivastava told mediapersons. He said, "Finding himself cornered the tractor driver ran away from the scene, abandoning the vehicle with 150 bags of DAP fertiliser, that was handed over to the police.

WOW!! The scion of the Indian raj-gharana happened to be near a truck with fake fertilizer. Where were the body guards / police / Congress workers who were protecting the Rajkumar? Did they just let him accost the miscreant on his own. Did the Rajkumar smell the fake fertilizer? Does he have a portable gas-chromatograph or better yet, X-Ray vision? Yes. UP Congress bigwigs would have you believe that our Rajkumar is actually a crime fighter (like Batman or Spiderman) disguised as a powerful politician. Please read the article and see if you can read it with a straight face.

What can be done to stop the criminal and ridiculous activities to win in UP? Instead of dividing Andhra Pradesh and creating a Muslim dominated Telangana, they should divide UP so that we get two states with about 40 MPs each and thus will be lesser prizes. Thanks to disastrous SP and BSP politics, western UP’s culture has become entirely different from eastern UP anyway. So may as well split it. There won’t be any fight over Lucknow as there will be over Hyderabad.

Uttar Pradesh: 685 crore for a park, 18 crore for encephalitis
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati will inaugurate a Rs. 685-crore park in Noida today with an impressive posse of 2500 policemen and about 40,000 BSP workers in attendance. From about 750 km away in the same state come some more sombre statistics: More than 400 children have died in and around Gorakhpur in eastern UP this year of the deadly Japanese encephalitis, and the Mayawati government has sanctioned Rs. 18 crore to combat the menace.
The article can be read at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/uttar-pradesh-685-crore-for-a-park-18-crore-for-encephalitis-141178&cp

The Rahul Gandhi superhero exploits can be read at: http://www.rediff.com/news/report/rahul-detects-fake-fertiliser-on-bundelkhand-tour/20111012.htm