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Volume LVIII, No. 12
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rajesh Ramachandran
GROUP CREATIVE DIRECTOR R. Prasad
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR Sunil Menon
CHIEF OF BUREAU Pranay Sharma
ASST EXECUTIVE EDITOR Satish Padmanabhan
POLITICAL EDITOR Bhavna Vij-Aurora
WRITERS Arindam Mukherjee, Lola Nayar,
Qaiser Mohammad Ali (Senior Associate
Editors), G.C. Shekhar (Associate Editor),
Dola Mitra (Sr Asst Editor), Pragya Singh,
Prachi Pinglay-Plumber (Asst Editors), Ajay
Sukumaran, Naseer Ganai (Senior Special
Correspondents), Arushi Bedi, Siddhartha
Mishra (Correspondents)
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Published for the week of March 20-26, 2018
Released on March 17, 2018
Total no. of pages 84, Including Covers
We Said It!
A
weekly newsmagazine, for many, is an oxymoron. When the device in their
pockets twitters every other second, why should they wait for a week (sure,
60x60x24x7 is a hell of a lot of time) for news to appear on the stands. The
less nasty ones call the newsmagazine an anachronism. But we have, yet
again, proven them wrong. Last week around this time we told our readers
that the biggest piece of political news wasn’t Tripura and that it was going
to come from Uttar Pradesh, from Gorakhpur and Phulpur to be precise. The BSP’s
unconditional support to the SP to fight the bypolls, announced at the very last
moment, was our cover story. And now, a week later everybody is repea-tweeting
what we said on the cover, that this political understanding is going to be a game
changer in 2019, if it remains intact. The next Lok Sabha polls are a year away. And
that is a very long time in politics. Yet, it can be said even now in no uncertain terms
that an SP-BSP alliance is a solid bloc of 40 per cent votes even at their worst.
Anything above 40 per cent is a legitimate electo
ral wave and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adit-
yanath could not whip up one despite a campaign
against criminals. Sure, criminals too have human
rights and extra-judicial murders cannot be justified.
But UP had become an impossible place to travel:
women were getting raped and killed, and men were
getting robbed and killed on expressways. The worst
affected were the poor and the marginalised in the
villages who had to live in dread of these criminals
who often belonged to dominant castes. The only
sign these dominant caste thugs could read was the
smoking gun. Once Yogi’s crackdown began, many
even started booking cells in jail. Yogi’s other notable
intervention was in the cheating industry in school examinations. But these were
obviously not enough even for the people of Gorakhpur. Their hospital was a mess;
scores of children were dying. The promised good days weren’t here yet. And all
the lynchings and floggings had their effect in a complete consolidation of Muslim
and Dalit votes against the BJP. A consolidation visible in the Bihar bypolls as well.
These bypoll results have a twof old message to offer. One, UP and Bihar, like
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, have slipped into anti-incumbency
mode, with voters turning against their governments. They want the promise of
good days to be delivered and right now. Hindutva in itself was never a winning
formula for the BJP after the Babri Masjid demolition and without the promise of
prosperity Hindutva is actually a liability. It can only help consolidate anti-BJP
votes. So, unless the BJP rewires its campaign completely in UP and the rest of the
Hindi heartland it could be in for a shock in 2019 as it had maximised its votes and
seats in UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh
and Jharkhand—the so-called cow belt.
The second message is for the Sangh parivar’s internal consumption. In an elec-
toral democracy a candidate has to face two contests: first within and then without.
Unless he or she emerges successful within, no candidate gets an opportunity to lead
a party in a constituency, state assembly or Parliament. There was talk of Yogi rep
lacing Modi, just talk, and that has got discarded conclusively after these results. All
these bypolls in MP, Rajasthan and UP have proved that the BJP, so far, doesn’t have
another candidate to lead the party in 2019.
Rajesh Ramachandran
26 March 2018 OUTLOOK 3