I
remember an incident that goes 10 years back into my memory. I was returning to
Varanasi from a
nearby village in the Chanduali district. I was driving my bike on one side of
the road keeping my speed around 50 Kmph. Suddenly, I found some voices
shouting at me. When I looked back, I saw cavalcade of a local politician
(possibly an ‘elected’ MLA) coming through. It had many SUVs and many more
bikes. There wasn’t any road discipline. The vehicles of the fleet had covered
almost of the width of the road and other vehicles coming from the opposite
side had to leave the road to give pass to the cavalcade.
Though,
I was not trying to be a hero but I felt it was wrong and I kept on driving on
my line. I was already on the side of the road and there was enough of the
space available for the cavalcade to pass and I thought they would adjust
seeing that I was already on driving the side.
But
I was wrong. Even if driving on one side, I was still on the road. I
increasingly felt that some vehicle of the fleet would crush me if I didn’t
take my bike off the road. Then, I suddenly felt a gush of dust and honking and
don’t know how but my bike slid away from the road to the dusty patch of the
open field.
The
cavalcade that was driving at 70-80 Kmph on a narrow and poorly laid road of
the rural Uttar Pradesh zoomed past me leaving me in a state of inertia of
shock. The cavalcade, as long as it was in my sight, did the same thing with
every other vehicle on the road.
This
incident is a direct reading into the mind of the characters of many
politicians who inhabit the power corridors of India’s most populous state, Uttar
Pradesh (UP). Badlands of UP are now a statewide phenomenon with increasing
number of tainted and criminal elements making their way into active politics
and legislature.
The
state has seen a sharp decline on this front in the last two decades. With
dominance of issueless politics, the rowdy elements have registered increasing
presence at the political forefront to exploit equations based on community and
caste considerations.
Politicians
like Raja Bhaiya are its living example. And he is not alone. There are many
like Mukhtar Ansari, Amarmani Tripathi, Vinod Singh, Vijay Mishra, Abhay Singh
and the list is long.
A
feeling of dire hopelessness has crept in the state and it seems development
and progressive politics are not going to happen any time soon.
It
was this hopelessness that gave Akhilesh Yadav a landslide victory in the 2012
assembly election. He had to play it different.
Like
the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Samajwadi Party (SP), too, has had a history
of negative politics in the state promoting elements of goondaism and
corruption.
But
being a young face, a hopeless electorate saw some hope in Akhilesh that he
would take a different stride away from the SP-brand of politics and will put
the state back on the path of law and order and development.
Akhilesh
Yadav is completing one year in the office on March 15, 2013 and that ‘some
hope’ is totally shattered.
It’s
not just about murder of a righteous cop in Kunda, where an already tainted
state minister with dozens of criminal cases against him had to resign after
allegations of conspiring to kill the Circle Officer of the state police force,
the state has seen a flood of criminal incidents since Akhilesh took over in
March 2012.
According
to the media reports sighting the official state records, the state saw 2437
murders, more than 1700 cases of sexual assault and over 450 robberies during
the first six months of Akhilesh’s tenure.
Another report in January said the state registered 1723 rape case in 10
months since Akhilesh took over. Since March 2012, the state has seen 13
communal riots.
It
is not if the crime rate was more or less during Mayawati’s tenure. The state
saw an atmosphere of overall decline during her term as the chief minister.
Criminals and ‘criminal-turn-politicians’ ran amok. Corruption did every thing
to be in league with the sky-high corruption of the United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) government. Law and order took a nosedive. Development became restricted
to Mayawati-themed statues and parks.
But
Akhilesh was given the charge to undo that and so any comparison with the
record of the previous government can never be a plausible reasoning.
One
year might not be enough to analyze the state’s development under Akhilesh
Yadav but the chief minister has not been even indicative of working intently
to bring the state back on the path of development and issue-based politics.
Instead,
the badlands are getting more frightening. Criminals and
‘criminal-turn-politicians’ are still running amok. No one is talking of
development. The politics of appeasement and political corruption continue to
have their run unabated.
Yes,
no one had expected miracle in March 2012, but at least, there was some hope
that the process of reconciliation with a progressive brand of politics would
be given some serious consideration with a younger energy at the helms of the
affairs. That hope has taken a serious beating.