Congress emerging strongest party in Uttar Pradesh, says Sriprakash Jaiswal

Lauding Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi for his efforts to familiarize with problems faced by the common man, Union Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal has said that because of him Congress party is emerging to be the strongest party in Uttar Pradesh.

Talking to reporters here, Jaiswal said that it is because of Gandhi's efforts that Congress is emerging as a favourite and other political parties such as Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party are being marginalized by voters.

"The way Rahul Gandhi interacts with the common man and presents the urgency to deal with their problems including poverty and unemployment, I think is commendable. He is also determined to deal with people from all strata of the society and give them equivalent importance," he said.

"It is because of his efforts that the Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party are being marginalized by voters. I also think that Congress party is emerging to be the strongest party in Uttar Pradesh," he added.

Uttar Pradesh will elect a new 403-member state assembly in March, and the poll results are expected to broadly indicate trends for 2014 general elections..

Huge political cover-up begins to ensure fairness of Indian election

AN ARMY of labourers, using truckloads of cloth and plastic sheeting, are racing against time to comply with a federal election commission decree to cover up numerous statues of a flamboyant woman politician ahead of next month’s provincial elections in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

The commission had stipulated last week that about a dozen 15ft bronze and marble statues of Ms Mayawati, who uses only one name, violated electoral rules in Uttar Pradesh and therefore needed covering.

It declared that the statues in the state capital Lucknow and in Noida, a New Delhi suburb, as well as those of 190 elephants, which are her BSP or National Political Party symbol, also needed to be concealed as they could unduly influence voters.

“We have done this to ensure a level playing field for all political parties,” chief election commissioner S Y Qureshi said.

The statues are to be covered by today as under election rules all portraits of the provincial chief minister need to be removed from government offices ahead of elections.

But the election commission’s decision has drawn severe criticism from Ms Mayawati’s party, which demanded to know whether it would also order the removal of lotus flowers from ponds or ban bicycles because they too were rival party symbols.

Other analysts and political parties said covering up the statues, which Ms Mayawati, the ‘untouchable’ or Dalit chief minister of the country’s most populous and backward province, flaunts as a symbol of low-caste empowerment, could even work in her political favour.

They said her party candidates could claim during campaigning that by covering up her statues, the upper castes were deliberately attempting to “deface” Ms Mayawati merely because she was a Dalit.

Workers beavering to get the statues covered were apprehensive of meeting the deadline. “It is an elephantine problem to drape these statues,” Ramesh Shukla, a government officer overseeing the work, said.

In a display of political omnipotence extravagant even by India’s outlandish standards, Ms Mayawati erected the statues after being elected state chief minister five years ago.

She inaugurated 15 substantial parks resembling in Lucknow crammed with massive bronzes, stone and marble statues and friezes of herself, fellow Dalit community leaders and scores of elephants.

In one larger-than-life statue she is clutching a handbag and pointing like a conquering heroine at a fresco. The carvings are estimated to have cost the state exchequer $250 million, money that her critics maintain could have been gainfully spent on water, power, employment, education and medical care for the state’s 170 million people, a large proportion of them abjectly poor.

If independent, Uttar Pradesh would be the world’s seventh largest country. The Congress party, which heads the ruling federal coalition, has been campaigning hard in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most politically important state, but many analysts predict Ms Mayawati will be returned to office. If so, it would make the 58-year old politician an influential player in the 2014 general elections.

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Muslim politics and Rushdie: Why 2012 is not 1988

If the beard were a sign of wisdom, goats would preach. The vice-chancellor of the Deoband seminary, Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, sports a long, flowing beard, but his bleatings only betray a mind that is trapped in 20th century politics.

The maulana wants the government to disallow writer Salman Rushdie from visiting India for the Jaipur literary festival because, he says, Muslims are even today incensed over his “anti-Islamic” writing in The Satanic Verses, which the Rajiv Gandhi government banned in 1988.

Perhaps the maulana felt that in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, with the Congress – and most regional parties – on overdrive to harvest the Muslim vote, the seminary could inject itself into the political arena with an outlandish demand that the Congress would find hard to reject. He probably saw Rushdie as a low hanging fruit to play the victimhood card.

But the manifest attempt to whip up manufactured Muslim rage may yet fall flat on its face for the reason that 2012 isn’t quite 1988. Even the Congress, which has perfected the art of pandering to minority sensibilities and continues to feed off the politics of victimisation, is wary of heeding the appeal to disallow Rushdie from visiting India.

The ban on the Satanic Verses was imposed in 1988 when a politically inept Rajiv Gandhi, caught up in the Bofors kickback allegations, resorted to reflexive appeasement to win back the Muslim support that his party had seemingly lost with the decision in 1986 to reopen the locks at the disputed site where the Babri Masjid stood.

Together with the regressive law that the parliament passed in 1986 to dilute the Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case (where the court upheld Muslim women’s right to alimony in the event of a divorce), the decision to ban The Satanic Verses marked a new low in minority appeasement.

The Congress paid a heavy political price for that appeasement, which contributed to the rise of the BJP starting with the 1989 elections. And although that reflexive instinct of pandering to minority sensitivities is still alive and well in the Congress, even it has had to acknowledge that the centre of gravity of Indian politics has since shifted in a way that has marginalised the Shahi Imams and the maulanas.

There was a time in the late 1980s, when political parties would get their list of party candidates for elections vetted by the Imam – who would then “deliver” the Muslim vote in its entirety.

Minority politics has come some way since then, particularly with a new generation of Muslim youth rejecting the politics of victimhood of the earlier generation of leaders and instead seeking out economic opportunities in an India that has moved into a high growth orbit.

For instance, when the Jama Masjid Imam Syed Ahmed Bukhari issued a fatwa in August last year directing Muslims to boycott the fast by Anna Hazare at Ramlila Grounds because of the “nationalist” slogans that were raised there, many young Muslims publicly rejected the fatwa.

“Why should we accept what some leaders with vested interests tell us is right or wrong? Will what we say or not say change our identity or our faith?” said one young Muslim woman who addressed the crowds at Ramlila grounds.

But the memo from such young Muslims appears not to have reached the mullahs and the maulanas. With their mindless resort to identity politics of the last century, they are only reinforcing their own political irrelevance today.