From Lucknow to Lutyens by Abhigyan Prakash

Author:Abhigyan Prakash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Bastions

For all these long years that I have looked at UP as a journalist, one of the most distinctive features of its politics is the string of political heavyweights that emerged from the state to become prime ministers, chief ministers and king-makers in Indian politics. It was natural that these leaders had their political pocket-boroughs, which I call their ‘bastions’. But despite UP having produced politicians of national significance, the region itself could never transform for the better. And this is the story of UP—the state from where the biggest names in Indian politics have emerged but which continues to remain unreasonably backward.

My trip to my birthplace of Varanasi in 2014 was a most unusual one. Never before in the past had the city seen the kind of political buzz it did when Narendra Modi declared that he would contest the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from here. On 23 April 2014, Varanasi, the preeminent holy city of Hindus, was under the spotlight of national and international television media. The temple city was crawling with cameras and television crews, and the local people were finding it difficult to adjust to the atmospherics that filled the city. The sheer number of OB vans in the streets of the city left them overwhelmed. Varanasi, as a city of shrines and palaces, had always been of religious significance to them and they had seen it draw people from across the country in the millions. But at no point in the past had the city drawn so much attention for political reasons. The most promising face of the elections was being fielded from their city. As the locals watched the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Modi filing his nomination papers from the city, it was clear that Varanasi was going to be the talking point of the entire nation during the 2014 general election.

While the locals of Varanasi were perplexed at the extraordinary publicity a city of supposedly religious significance was getting in national politics, for many long-time observers of Uttar Pradesh politics, including me, this was not at all surprising. Having travelled extensively across Maharashtra and Gujarat and having constantly heard about ‘Modi’s Banaras’, to me the party’s decision to field its prime ministerial candidate from one of the key cities of the Purvanchal region of Uttar Pradesh was a familiar strategy and formula many political parties had already used in past: to choose Uttar Pradesh and especially the Purvanchal region of the state as their electoral battlefield; to set the tone for the election from there and amplify it rhetorically to maximize their electoral gains across the country.

In fact, I started my election coverage of UP from another place of enormous political and religious significance—Ayodhya—and then travelled by road to Varanasi. The BJP’s point was by then clear: Modi, despite being from Gujarat, would be the new face of the party’s UP representation, as had been the case with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who represented Lucknow in the Lok Sabha five times although he originally hailed from Madhya Pradesh.

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