UP misses date with modernity due to backward elites

The backwardness of Uttar Pradesh, now in the middle of an assembly election that points to a cliff-hanger verdict, can easily be imputed to its bad and even villainous politicians.

The problems of a polity do not begin and end with politicians. It has to be traced back to the state of society as well. In UP, which is placed squarely in the middle of the Hindi heartland, the society is stranded in the mud and slush of a century-old decadence, which its people are not able to shake off. And there is not much help from its better educated sections, the top rung with its apparent sophistication, to clear the cobwebs and clean up the dirt of years.

National Minority Commission chairman Wajahat Habibullah said UP and Bihar had one of the best civil service officers at the helm and that they were doing a good job in the 1960s when he got into the civil service.

According to him, the two states which are now an emblem of notorious backwardness were once examples of brilliant officers and good administration.

Though he had an opportunity to choose his home state of UP, he did not see much challenge in terms of doing something new and that is why he opted for a state like Jammu and Kashmir where there seemed much work needed to be done.

It can be argued perhaps that since the 1960s, politicians had undermined the traditions of upright officers and clean governance in UP and Bihar, and it would not be difficult to dole out umpteen examples to prove the point. To restrict oneself to UP, what Habibullah sees as a positive aspect of the state of affairs seems to be the root of the problem. The whole perspective seems to be confined to the issue of what the government is and what its personnel can do.

The society remains a passive recipient of the good that a government delivers. When the government falters, then the general conditions deteriorate. And this is what has happened in the last four decades n UP.

It is a neat view of the mess. But the problem goes deeper and it is a social one. It points to the failure of UP’s elites. There has been an elite class in the state — and the Nehru family is part of this — which was both wealthy and modern and set an example in terms of education, culture and economic status as to what can be achieved in a world which has so many new opportunities to offer. It is the elite that formed part of the political and administrative leadership before and after Independence. But before the bad and populist politicians came on the scene sometime in the 1970s, the elite class of this late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to deliver modernity to the rest of UP. Nehru was a powerful and charismatic icon of modernity and he impacted the thinking of the middle class in the entire country but not in UP. It seems his home state remained impervious to his modernist zeal.

The problem and challenge that Rahul Gandhi faces in UP today seems to be the same as what his great grandfather faced. He is unable to transmit the message of modernity to the people of the state though he is himself the child of modernity. On the other hand, he is trying desperately hard to adjust to the existing levels of social, economic and political backwardness and trim his rhetoric to the cribbed situation. His campaign aggressiveness is unbecoming of a modern leader and shows how he has compromised with the ground reality. The other young and modern politician in the fray, SP’s Akhilesh Yadav, is also a helpless leader who seems compelled to speak to the people in their own language of deprivation instead of holding out the promise of modernity. The SP promise to give away computers and tablets is not a sign of modern temper. The other man with a modern sensibility who failed to perform the transformation act is Ajit Singh, who has a rare sense of humour and understanding of the imperatives of modernity.

It is quite easy to blame these politicians for the failure of the modernity project in UP. But the malaise runs deeper. It is the failure of the majority of upper classes — yes, many if not all of them are from the so-called upper castes and including the Muslims — and it seems that they remained feudal in their own state though they jostled with the crowds outside. They did not display the spirit of egalitarianism sufficiently strongly to change the social atmosphere.

They went out into the world but did not bother to bring the world to UP. Mayawati is the only one who seems to have sensed this and her beautification plans for Lucknow, however misconceived, reveal a glint of the modernist spirit.