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The Rediff Special/ Ramesh Menon

BJP's man of the moment

Rajnath Singh has taken over as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh with a jumbo cabinet. He has little choice. He has too many legislators to please. Staying in the saddle is not going to be easy. Winning the coming elections seems an uphill task. And there are very serious issues that he has to address. Will he? Or will his time and energy be spent just keeping the government going?

Uttar Pradesh has been famous for its politics clinging to the lowest denominator of public taste.

It is a state where criminals get respectability in politics.

It is a state where the mafia has started dictating policies.

Is a new chief minister going to make a difference?

At 49, Rajnath Singh is a much better choice than 77 year old Ram Prakash Gupta. It was an act of desperation by the BJP which now sees a grim picture of its credibility emerging in the state. But, Rajnath at least has a political perspective and could end up doing some work to lift one of India's most backward states from the depths it is in. Maybe, he could also give his battered party a better image.

But the real question is whether Rajnath's appointment will make any difference to the people of Uttar Pradesh. The state is sliding into a fiscal abyss. The employment situation is grave. So is power. While other states are cashing in on the information technology boom, Uttar Pradesh is no where in the race. It is not being seen as a destination for businessmen.

Increasingly, political pundits are drawing similarities between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Here is one state where superintendents of police are being shot in the daytime. Mafia groups rule the roost with organised kidnapping, extortion and blackmail. Will the mafia continue to rule? Has time run out of Uttar Pradesh? Or can Rajnath Singh rub in some magic for a turnaround?

There were pictures all over the newspapers showing the sacked chief minister Ram Prakash Gupta hugging his successor. There were also statements of both of them, of how they cared for each other and how they respected each other. But the knives were out for Gupta long ago. And knowing the state's politics, Rajnath would be a fool to believe that his detractors not only in the Opposition, but also within his party are not sharpening the knives for him. The state unit is plagued with rivalry. Most of it short-sighted and petty. It is power politics that punctuate the state. Not politics designed to lift the state from the pathetic state it is in.

Rajnath does not have an easy job.

Rajnath Singh's appointment shows that the BJP has finally made up its mind that its real constituency is the upper class. It is not the other backward classes or the minority votes that will help it taste power once again. The assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh comes exactly a year away and the party wants to take no chances.

The BJP wanted to use Rajnath to consolidate all the Thakur and Rajput votes. Ironical. In November 1999, Rajnath was not considered for the post because he belonged to the "wrong" caste. At that time the BJP wanted to paint itself as a party that was not exclusively for the upper castes.

Having a Thakur chief minister in caste ridden Uttar Pradesh, the party thought, would send the wrong signals. The gameplan is to then possibly tie up with Mayawati after the elections to ensure that Mulayam Singh Yadav and his Samajwadi Party is kept out. Now, with Kalraj Mishra, the BJP also has a Brahmin as its state president.

Rajnath's appointment once again underlines the RSS hold on the government. But Vajpayee had earlier wanted to get him into the Uttar Pradesh saddle as Gupta was an embarrassing choice.

Gupta was an obscure RSS nominee. In no Indian state has the BJP had such a poor showing as UP as far as governance is concerned. It has dented the party's image. Gupta just slept through his term as the bureaucracy got extremely politicised and lethargic. No one seemed to be bothered where the state was heading. As political commentator Pushpesh Pant of the Jawaharlal Nehru University says: "By installing Gupta, the BJP avoided internal wrangling but peace was bought at a very heavy cost."

Rajnath was the ultimate choice as only he will have the political savvy to keep the government going as the BJP led coalition will have a wafer thin majority after the formation of Uttaranchal.

Rajnath is not a newcomer to the politics of appeasement and adjustments. It was he who saved the BJP government when the Bahujan Samaj Party parted ways from the coalition government.

What is Rajnath Singh's agenda other than holding the government together till the next elections in October 2001? Said he to rediff.com: "Law and order is the first and topmost priority. " He hurries to say, "The law and order situation is currently not bad as Gupta handled the law and order situation very well." Among other things he says that the problems of farmers and villages, which had not been paid proper attention, would also figure in his list of priorities (read as, look at the vote-bank fast as time is running out).

Is Rajnath Singh going to be another Sushma Swaraj is a question lot of people are asking. But Rajnath is quick to answer the question saying that he is not another scapegoat and would try and improve the situation in the state.

As the Union surface transport minister he was pushing Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's dream project of expressways linking the four major metros of India. He was looking at projects totalling Rs 55,000 crores. But he was allocating most of the government's funds to his own state, Uttar Pradesh.

Mulayam Singh Yadav will lose no opportunity to splinter the coalition and ride back to power. Rajnath is the only one in the BJP who can counter elements both within the BJP like Kalraj Mishra, the BJP president and Lalji Tandon, the urban development minister.

When he was studying in the Bhabhaura village of Varanasi district in a little primary school in the mid-fifties, none of Rajnath's teachers figured out that he would one day be the chief minister of the state.

By the time he was 13, Rajnath was already indoctrinated by the RSS. The rest is history.

Step by step, Rajnath climbed. In 1972, he became an RSS general secretary of Mirzapur. Then, secretary of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in Gorakhpur. He then stepped into the Jan Sangh and became one of its district presidents. He was jailed during the emergency. At the age of 33, he became a MLA from the Mirzapur constitutency.

Rajnath was remembered for making copying in exams a criminal offence when he was an education minister in Uttar Pradesh. But his attempts at distorting history in the syllabus to suit his party's agenda, showed the colour of his real skin.

Ruling Uttar Pradesh and marching his party to victory in the coming state elections is Rajnath's political challenge. A greater challenge is rescuing its 150 million residents from backwardness and helplessness. They have been cursed by bad governments for far too long.

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