New Delhi: The battle for Uttar Pradesh has well and truly begun with all the major political parties in the state sounding their bugle for what is expected to a fiercely contested four-way battle for securing power in Lucknow after the 2012 Assembly elections.
Uttar Pradesh with 403 Assembly and 80 Lok Sabha seats is politically the most crucial state in Indian politics and the winner of the 2012 Assembly elections will certainly be in an advantageous position to either form the government at the Centre after the next Lok Sabha elections or at least hold the key to power in New Delhi.
With Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party strongly entrenched in power; the rivals are employing and engaging their best strategists to find a way to dislodge the Dalit leader.
The Samajwadi Party, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are the principal rivals and among them only the first seems to be in a position to dislodge Mayawati from power even as the other two have been making a lot of noise about being the frontrunner to gain power in Lucknow.
The Congress, hoping to ride on the Rahul Gandhi charisma, and the BJP have been trying to portray themselves as the only ones capable of pulling out Uttar Pradesh from the morass that the state is presently in even though under the Mayawati regime the state has registered 7.28 per cent GDP growth rate against the target of 6.10 per cent in 11th five year plan (2007-12).
While the high growth rate has helped certain regions of the state like areas adjoining Lucknow and Noida-GreaterNoida-Ghaziabad near New Delhi, a major part of the state particularly Bundlekhand and Poorvanchal are still struck in extreme poverty and backwardness, giving the Congress the much needed stick to beat the Mayawati government with.
Buoyed by the spectacular show during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections during which the Congress won 22 seats and led in over 100 Assembly constituencies in the state, Rahul Gandhi has been trying to paint a rosy picture that the Grand Old Party of India is now poised to regain it pre-eminent position in the state after Mission UP-2012.
He has missed no opportunity to target the Mayawati regime and has been digging out instances of atrocities against the Dalits in particular to target the BSP government. Mentored by Digvijaya Singh, Congress General Secretary and in-charge of the party in Uttar Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi has been touring the state, stepping inside Dalit homes, posing with their malnourished children and eating with them to highlight what he says are instances that show that whatever Mayawati may claim, the plight of one of the lowest echelons of the society has hardly changed in the state during her rule.
While Mayawati has been able to provide a stable government to the state and can also claim credit for the acceleration in the economic growth in the state, Uttar Pradesh still remains at the bottom of several social and economic indicators. The state has also witnessed several high profile cases of BSP MLAs and state ministers accused of being involved in corruption, rape and murder cases. Even Mayawati has been facing charges of corruption, but that has not stopped her stature from growing.
However, the Congress scion has not targeted Mayawati and the BSP on the corruption issue vociferously as his own party's record on the issue during the recent past does not inspire any confidence.
Perhaps there is a fear within the Congress that making corruption a major issue would boomerang on the party as it is already on the backfoot after the Anna Hazare movement and the various scams that have hit the Central Government in the last two years.
The Congress has been given several hot political issues but Rahul's record of influencing Congress' fortune in state elections does not inspire confidence even though he is widely credited with his party's good show during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
Bihar and Tamil Nadu are just two examples where Rahul's so called charisma was swept away by Nitish Kumar and J Jayalalithaa respectively. In neither of the states Congress could make much headway. In Bihar, huge crowds gathered during Rahul's rallies but when it was the time to vote the Congress candidates were given huge thumbs down and the party's tally fell by more than 50 per cent and it now has just four MLAs in the state.
The scenario was similar in Tamil Nadu where the Congress was also handicapped by its alliance with the DMK, whose leaders have been arrested in the 2G spectrum allocation scam.
After the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Rahul has tried very hard to emerge as the youthful face of the Congress, but he has failed to address several key problems confronting India and its states.
Apart from a small and well-scripted speech on the Lokpal Bill in the Lok Sabha following the Anna Hazare movement, he has said little on the corruption issue. He has neither outlined his views on the economic situation of the country nor has he articulated his stand on other burning issues like price rise and Naxalism.
The less said about his take on India's foreign policy the better as he has never spoken about India's relations with its neighbours or the major world powers.
Under such circumstances it is very difficult to believe that Rahul holds the magic wand to take either Uttar Pradesh or India out of the quagmire.
Mere good intentions don't make good leaders and the world of Indian politics can be very unforgiving. Several veteran political leaders have failed to read the voters' mind and bitten the dust.
Rahul is still a political novice compared to the leaders he is pitted against in Uttar Pradesh and even his party does not have the kind of network in the state like the ones that Samajwadi Party and the BSP have.
Parachuting into remote corners of the state and targeting the government in Lucknow will only give him headlines in the national media, but will hardly help the Congress candidate win votes unless Rahul comes up with a blueprint to put the state on the path of development shorn of caste and community identities that the Uttar Pradesh has come to symbolise since the late 1980s.
Till now the Congress has been able to only capitalise on the farmers-police clash in Bhatta and Parsaul villages of Greater Noida in the state and highlighted the lacuna in the land acquisition rules. But here too Mayawati was quick to respond and came up with new land acquisition norms to neutralise the Congress' advantage.
After alleging that several farmers were killed and women raped at Bhatta-Parsaul, Rahul failed to take the land acquisition battle forward and convert it into an issue that affected the entire state. This failure can also be attributed to the poor organisational capability of the Congress and could come to haunt the party dearly during the Assembly elections.
While Rahul has tried to revive the fledging membership of the Congress with an emphasis on youth, he has failed to pin the state government on any major issue.
The party has steadily lost its votebank in the state in the last two decades. While the forward castes moved to the BJP during the heydays of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid agitation, the backward castes, Muslims and Dailts embraced the Samajwadi Party and the BSP.
With the downfall of the BJP, several forward castes are looking for options and the Congress is hoping that they will embrace the party because of their perceived animosity towards the Samajwadi Party and the BSP, which have been championing the cause of the OBCs and Dalits.
But the BSP has built a strong votebank comprising of Dalits, Muslims and some sections of the forward castes, particularly the Brahmins, which helped Mayawati storm to power in Lucknow in 2012.
Rahul is hoping to break Mayawati's votebank and reclaim its lost glory. But the going is tough as the party is yet to find candidates in most of the Assembly constituencies who can successfully challenge the current MLAs and other rivals.
The BSP has 221 MLAs, Samajwadi Party 88, BJP 48 and the Congress is a distant fourth with only 20 members in Uttar Pradesh Assembly, which has 403 seats. During the 2012 Lok Sabha elections the Congress won 22 seats out of the 80 in the state and led in early 100 Assembly seats, which the party's poll managers and strategists and hoping will help it mount a serious challenge during the state elections.
But fighting an election is just like going to war. It requires a good general, a brilliant strategy and a motivated army to win and it will be worthwhile to see if Rahul is able to marshal his troops for the tough battle or is ambushed much his battle-scarred rivals.
Recent elections have shown that it is either an extremely good governance record (Nitish Kumar in Bihar), a ray of hope against and autocratic and highhanded a state government (Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal) or an alternative against a regime perceived to be extremely corrupt (AIADMK in Tamil Nadu) that can be claim the spoils of war.
While Rahul and the Congress can claim solace from Mamata Banerjee's astounding victory in West Bengal, the truth remains that the Trinamool Congress chief had fought single-handedly against the Left Front in the state for nearly two decades and boasts of an impeccable political acumen, something which the Congress 'yuvraj' has not displayed till now.
So even as Rahul launched his party's election campaign on Monday (November 14) from Phulpur, a constituency which once sent his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru to the Lok Sabha, the road that goes towards Lucknow seems to very bumpy and full of potholes for the Congress.
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