Demonetisation a limited currency in Uttar Pradesh?
If there’s a national issue at stake in the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, it’s demonetisation. The sentiment of class revenge it aroused at the outset has ebbed, but not dissipated. That’s where lies the grey space — a territory unknown to all contestants.
It isn’t a subject that’ll decide the election but may give the potential winner the headstart.
That is why the SP-Congress and the BSP deride demonetisation as pain without gain.
The BJP downplays the downside. Its leaders present demonetisation as Narendra Modi’s resolve to fight graft; to afford the poor their share in the country’s wealth. Their defence smacks of diffidence, speak as they do with half-conviction.
But public memory can be short, selective. The sense one gets from the ground is that identity gives way to angst where suffering is deep, such as loss of jobs, drop in incomes. Otherwise, caste allegiances and historical biases make for the bigger picture. Those driven by such concerns want punished the tormentors in their vicinity. Not big players.
A cabbie who drove me around in Lucknow, Barabanki and Faizabad voted for Modi in 2014 despite his Yadav identity. He’s now for a renewed term for Akhilesh Yadav. Reason: Notebandi, the CM’s youthful appeal and his spring cleaning of the SP.
At Ramsnehi Ghat in Barabanki, a scheduled caste boy, Bajram Gautam, vented ire against demonetisation that left a plywood factory without business and him without a job. He and Anup Kaushal, a baniya who unloaded trucks at the factory, found the SP a better option than the BSP or BJP. In Barabanki’s Dariyabad, jeweller Diwakar Baba moved around campaigning on class basis. He said his clansmen wanted SP’s cycle to race ahead. But will it? Instead of saying it would, he said it should — if Mulayam Singh ceased to play the stranger in Akhilesh’s new-look party. That explained the electoral value of Modi’s charge of Akhilesh having wronged his father.
As villages and towns changed so did the narrative. At Safdarganj Chowk, close to where Modi addressed a poll meeting in Barabanki, Paras Chaudhary, a teacher, said he wasn’t paid as the private school where he worked had problems collecting fees.
But being a Kurmi, he was undecided. Why? The BSP and BJP have fielded candidates from his caste and the SP has a Yadav in the fray. “I teach maths so am given to serious calculation. I want to be sure that I’m on the winning side.”
As we sat chatting at a snack bar, its baniya owner said notebandi didn’t just impact his roadside enterprise. In his village, young men returned in droves on losing jobs in other states. “Hamara gaon bhara pada hai berozgar bachchon sei”.
The Pasis among the scheduled castes and the Kurmis shared similar stories. Yet the blow hasn’t turned them vengeful of the BJP. They seemed to be weighing options. The Kurmis at Modi’s rally pointed to Beni Prasad Varma’s alienation within the SP; the Pasis to their greater fear of the Yadavs.
These personality and casteoriented fault lines are spread across constituencies, making psephology difficult.
But the reality is Akhilesh, like Bihar’s Nitish Kumar in 2015, doesn’t evoke belligerent opposition. His challenge, together with that of Rahul Gandhi, is to transform incipient fondness to cogent love. In the absence of a discernible wave, it’s difficult to say if there’d be clear cut electoral endorsement — beyond Yadavs and Muslims — of their slogan of “UP ko ye saath pasand hai”.