Ignore the huge cutouts, giant hoardings, paid supplements in newspapers and endless ads on TV news channels showing images of the transformation that has taken place in Uttar Pradesh under the not so benign leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his saffron-robed protégé, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The bitter truth, though, is that not just UP's growth rate has plummeted, but also it has fallen abysmally on all governance issues.
Contrary to the findings of many social scientists, last-minute sops and announcements of grand projects seldom yield positive electoral outcomes. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is promising highways, airports, and universities to a state where it has fiercely pursued identity politics and demonised minorities. Why does it need to shore up its image as a party serious about the state's development and growth? Is it because the politics of Hindutva is flagging, or is there some other reason?
If economic performance is the criterion that the voters use to re-elect a government, then the BJP should bite the dust in the coming polls in February-March 2022. But the ruling party never gives an impression that it came to power on economic issues but triumphed due to muscular nationalism and the promise of Hindu primacy, which also meant diminishing secularism and the role Muslims enjoyed in the state's plural society. That is why the party leadership chose a monk-like Yogi Adityanath rather than a moderate like Manoj Sinha. Expectedly, Yogi built temples and deepened the fears in the majority community towards Muslims.
As his priorities were different, UP's growth rate fell since Adityanath became the chief minister in 2017. Under his predecessor, Akhilesh Yadav, the state's growth rate during his five-year term was 6.92 per cent, compared to that, it is 1.95 per cent under Adityanath. The state's economy has been further savaged by the high unemployment rate of youth, who can be heard wailing on news and YouTube channels of how the government has abandoned them and used brute force to smother their protests.
According to economist Santosh Mehrotra, for graduates and those with technical education, unemployment during Adityanath's term has jumped to 51 per cent and 46 per cent, respectively. So grim is the unemployment situation in UP that students struggle to complete any competitive examination as the test papers are leaked, and the entire process is abandoned. Many students from rural areas are putting an enormous burden on their parents by staying in cities hoping to participate in a competitive examination and snag a 'government' job. This government is addressing this monstrous challenge by making promises for infrastructure development that could hopefully lead to job growth.
Ever since the BJP came to power at the Centre, electoral outcomes have seldom dampened its ardour to form the government even when it has lost in the vote count. It has used muscle and financial power to engineer defections in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Goa, etc. What gives it legitimacy is a high-powered election campaign in which friendly media and pollsters are partners in building a narrative of electoral invincibility. That allows many gullible people to believe in this fiction that the party wins the polls even if it loses. Hence, there was nothing wrong with manipulating the outcome and keeping the "corrupt" Congress out of power. It was only in Maharashtra that the BJP was paid in the same coin.
If we keep the post-poll interventions out of this analysis and restrict our exploration to what impacts voting behaviour, we will find that it is both sophisticated as well as primeval. Till it was busted, Cambridge Analytica tried to use the platform of Facebook and artificial intelligence (AI) to shoehorn content for specific voters to build support for populist leaders and their causes. Donald Trump, Brexit, and the stunning loss that Jeremy Corbyn experienced in the UK were attributed to Cambridge Analytica. There was no evidence that it was involved in India's parliamentary elections in 2014, but the results are eerily similar.
However, in a study conducted in 2004 for the think tank ICRIER (Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations), titled, 'Economic growth, governance and voting behaviour: An application to Indian elections', economist Arvind Virmani found plenty of corroboration to his thesis that economic growth does impact voting behaviour. He took into cognisance several states that went to polls during the period of the study (2002-04) and found that some of them came to grief due to lazy growth rates. Madhya Pradesh's per capita had come down to 0.5 per cent, and Rajasthan was worse. It had collapsed from a high of 6.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Both for Parliament and Assembly elections, the Congress got angry thumbs down.
According to the study, Gujarat was an exception. Here again, GDP growth had fallen considerably during 1998-2003 compared to the previous five years of 1993-98. The belief is that the Congress would have won the elections in Gujarat if there was no Godhra incident in which a train coach carrying devotees from Ayodhya mysteriously caught fire. Narendra Modi strode to power based on this vote. Interestingly, Virmani says that the "growth factor reasserted itself", and Gujaratis voted for the Congress party a few months later.
In his conclusion, Virmani claims that parties that have made a sincere effort to improve governance - such as the quality and quantity of public goods and services supplied to citizens - have been able to beat the anti-incumbency factor once. On this count, too, Adityanath's performance has been pathetic, as evidenced during the horrific second wave of the pandemic. So inhuman was the handling of the crisis that it deepened the suffering of those impacted by the virus. There was an industrial scale undercounting of the dead even when visible to naked eyes to dress up the UP government's performance. Bodies were floated in the river Ganges as people did not have the money for firewood to cremate their dead. The ire of those who suffered during this horrific phase may impact the voting in the Assembly elections.
Quite evidently, with Modi and Adityanath leading the charge for re-election, the BJP again is hoping to return to power based on non-economic issues. Besides, it will also rely considerably on the chimera it manages to create with the help of bogus surveys and friendly media reporting to feed the narrative about its electoral invincibility.
(The author is the Editor of 'Hardnews' magazine)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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