Why Akhilesh has a law and order problem: It's the elections, stupid

Big fish freely devouring the small fish, that’s how Press Council of India chairperson Markandey Katju recently described Uttar Pradesh. This matsya nyaya, said the retired Supreme Court judge, is the worst possible state of a law and order breakdown. [caption id=“attachment_1550603” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Akhilesh Yadav. PTI[/caption] He was speaking on 9 June, and more has transpired since in the country’s largest state, compelling Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to say he’s “concerned”, causing speculation on whether the Centre will intervene and prompting ruling Samajwadi Party members to accuse the Centre of trying to wilfully damage the state government’s credibility. But much of the damage has been done by the deluge of bad news emanating from UP. Two weeks after the Badaun gangrape and murders, even as news of more incidents of sexual violence emerged, BJP politicians became targets of violence. On June 7,  Local BJP leader Vijay Pandit was gunned down in Dadri, Greater Noida. (Police later said the murder was on account of Pandit’s flagging of extortion cases, an old feud with a criminal gang, and not politically motivated.) On 10 June, Fatehpur MP Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti was attacked in her constituency. On 10 June, former Army man and local BJP leader Om Veer Singh was shot dead in his village Mirpur, in Muzaffarnagar. On 11 June, another BJP leader Puneet Singhal was shot at in Bulandshahr district. He survived. On 15 June, local leader Devendra Sharma’s mother was attacked in her house. Sharma was a losing BJP candidate in the 2012 Assembly election. Also on June 15, UP BJP leader Rakesh Rastogi’s body was found in a car along the Baheri-Nainital highway in Uttarakhand. Then, the same night, two constables were shot dead in Firozabad while they were chasing a gang of criminals. The incident led to violent protests in Firozabad, about 285 km from Lucknow. Whenever anybody asks about law and order in UP,  chief minister Akhilesh Yadav responds by calling it a grave and serious matter that the UP state governmen is treating with the utmost importance. However, the Samajwadi Party’s track record and specifically his own government’s record on law and order are far from impressive. When Muzaffarnagar occupied the headlines for days, there were reports that there had been a 100 small and major communal incidents and riots in the year and half since Akhilesh Yadav took power. In addition, the SP’s leaders have earned a reputation of turning a blind eye to wanton violence, permitting the lumpenisation of the SP cadre that believes it is not accountable to anybody. For its part, the BJP is certain that whether it’s Uttar Pradesh or West Bengal, regional parties in these states are out to eliminate the party through attacks on local leaders and intimidation of voters. But the recent violence is perhaps seen more logically as a corollary to a highly polarised election and the SP’s loss of its traditional votebanks. The election left the party with only 4 seats (all of them Yadav family members). The state government’s culpability in not acting quickly or effectively when Muzaffarnagar burnt kicked off a resurgence of politics of identity just before election season. It also realigned caste alliances and loyalties – helped along with BJP’s own election strategy. And it’s now obvious that the seismic shifts revealed by the election results are still playing out. There are bypolls to about a dozen Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh scheduled for later this year. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s very own Mainpuri Lok Sabha constituency will go in for a bypoll too, the SP supremo having vacated this seat while retaining Azamgarh. The elections will come just as Akhilesh completes two years of his tenure as the country’s youngest chief minister, and at a time when the Samajwadi Party finds its support base deeply eroded. Along with the BSP, the SP had staked claim to the political space vacated by both the Congress and the BJP in the early 2000s. The 2002, 2007 and 2012 Assembly elections all saw the Congress and BJP ceding top spot to either of these two regional parties. But the SP’s old MAJGAR (Muslim, Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, Rajput) alliance is now a thing of the past. With the Muzaffarnagar riots and the aftermath having spiralled out of control, probably well beyond the imagination of the state government, the party finds its Muslim support base eroding as well. Simultaneously, whether it is Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh or Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh or even Nitish Kumar in Bihar, the development agenda has seized centrestage in the political discourse of neighbouring, formerly BIMARU states.  Akhilesh,  for all his early charm as an urbane, young and technology-savvy leader who rode to power on a development agenda for “Uttam” Pradesh, has failed to live up to that promise. Over a year and half since he took charge, the laptop-distribution, the talk of investments and jobs have all come across as lip service while the deepening electricity crisis and deteriorating law and order have gained prominence. Meanwhile, the BJP capitalised – and with great success – on SP’s flailing vote banks with a clever combination of communal mobilisation and a development-for-all plank in the Lok Sabha polls. Faced with a gargantuan political crisis, the cornered chief minister has opted for bravado, claimed at a conclave for investors last week that there is no law and order crisis in his state. “It (law and order situation) is fine in UP and better than in many other states… That is why they (investors) have come in such large numbers,” he said, fooling nobody. Whether it is the angry and knee-jerk large-scale transfers of officers or the dissolution of district units of the Samajwadi Party in the aftermath of the election verdict, or the SP’s claim that the Centre is out to malign the UP government, they’re all signs of a Samajwadi Party government pushed to the corner and fearing worse to come. To believe that the attacks on BJP leaders in UP is a Samajwadi Party conspiracy is to overreact and oversimplify – at least one killing was not even politically motivated, investigations have found.  It is absurd to claim that the ruling Yadavs are targetting BJP leaders, giving them and the state the kind of attention they least need right now. It’s more a case of chickens – or in this case party thugs – coming home to roost. Akhilesh and Mulayam are paying the price for fostering a lumpen party culture and cadre. As the SP writhes and thrashes about trying to find its foothold in UP’s politics once again with bypolls coming, tensions are almost certain to escalate.