“The growth in UP may have been slower than in some states because of its size and the fact that all socio-religious and socio-political battles, including Mandal and the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation, took place here,” said the Samajwadi Party’s Siddiqui. “The real culprit is the Congress which ruled UP for decades and treated it as its fiefdom, without doing anything for its development. The Congress always treated the state merely as its vote bank and was only interested in the 80 MPs that the state could deliver.”
And the Congress claimed that the state was the fifth most developed in the country in 1989, the last year when it ruled Uttar Pradesh. Satyavrat Chaturvedi, a spokesperson for the Congress party, blamed the Samajwadi Party, BJP and BSP for UP’s sorry state. “Development has never been on the agenda for these parties which have sought votes by dividing the electorate along religious or caste lines,” he added.
Corruption is a problem in UP, but as a former government employee said, it is a problem in every state in the country and even in the Central government. T.S.R. Subramanian, who served as UP’s chief secretary in 1992-94, says politicians are much the same across the country. The difference, he said, is merely of degree. “Politicians are the culprits, of course, for institutionalizing unbridled corruption,” said Subramanian, “but equally, or perhaps even more, responsible is the bureaucracy which has completely lost its spine.”
The state’s other problems, according to political and social activists, have to do with caste and crime. Politician and social activist Subhashini Ali, president of the CPI(M)-backed All India Democratic Women’s Association said UP was suffering from the worst combination of “neo-liberal policies”, which encourage the state to move out of the social sector, and communal and caste mobilization for electoral gains.
Former DGP Singh alleges that at least 10 districts, including Gorakhpur, Ghazipur, Allahabad and Azamgarh, are in the firm grip of the mafia. “Fear is the chief emotion in UP today. In some districts, the mafia lords over key appointments as well, including that of the bureaucrats and police officers,” he added.
None of this would matter too much—it isn’t very different from what happens in other states as Subramaniam explained—to voters in Uttar Pradesh, had there been some progress on other fronts. Residents, however, claimed that this hasn’t happened.
Agra-based exporter Wahab Uddin Ahmed said that while the Mulayam Singh government may have turned the state’s finances around, to post a surplus in the budget for 2005-06 for the first time in nearly two decades, there has been no improvement in the state of roads, power or water. “Not that earlier governments were any better,” said Ahmed, “The only difference is that of late, power goes off at night as well. And when the power situation is erratic, water supply naturally gets affected.”