New-look Mulayam

PLAIN POLITICS

Industrialist Subroto Roy Sahara has declared that housing projects launched by the Sahara group in 50 cities in Uttar Pradesh will transform lifestyles "" the kitchens he promises middle class families will have piped mineral water at the nominal cost of 10 or 20 paise a litre.

Amitabh Bachchan "" the man who can be anything you want him to be "" is underwriting this and other dreams that towns like Lucknow, Kanpur and Gorakhpur are eagerly waiting to be shown.

Adi Godrej (whom Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav refers to periodically, as Adi Gopal, for reasons of linguistic convenience) and K V Kamath are happy to share the spotlight.

Nandan Nilekani will soon bring the IT revolution to the state, we're told, complete with an office assistant who will have to ask you in Hindi if you would like assistance in writing a letter (Hindi is the official language of the UP Legislative Assembly and you cannot operate in any other language without being censured).

So comprehensively is razzmatazz overtaking Uttar Pradesh that the citizenry is eagerly awaiting the planeloads of event managers and suits that will arrive in UP for the ultimate glamour event that every UP-ite is pining for: a World Economic Forum meeting in Lucknow or Allahabad. Indeed that's the only element missing from the dreams chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav is selling to the people of UP.

So are we looking at a new Mulayam Singh Yadav, a new style of politics, or a new role for the government in India's biggest state with a population of 170 million? If it were a country, it would be the world's sixth biggest.

It is home to the Taj Mahal and almost 10 per cent of the world's poor. And coming from a party that has had no discernible economic reforms agenda, the roll-out of plans for UP by the Samajwadi Party government has been nothing short of dramatic.

When out of government, the Samajwadi Party used to sing songs of swadeshi. Mulayam Singh Yadav's son Akhilesh's most memorable speech in the Lok Sabha was about why the government was only bothered about silicon chips and not about potato chips (ie agro processing, because in season, potatoes are sold at Re 1 a kg in some parts of UP).

Amar Singh's dalliance with the Australian media industry to rejuvenate the domestic entertainment world, was the only foray the Samajwadi Party had taken into issues of FDI. The party continues to oppose the blind entry of foreign money in India and supports swadeshi. It has strong views on agriculture.

This is driven by Mulayam Singh Yadav's vision, especially from the time he was minister for agricultural cooperatives in UP in the 1960s. But on policy, the tendency in the Samajwadi Party has been to make it up as they go along.

What is happening today is a radical change. Twenty-four unviable sugar mills in UP have been closed. The government is withdrawing from several sectors and is not shying away from co-opting industry into the policymaking establishments.

A policy for promotion of private investment in the development of hitech townships in U P has been cleared by the cabinet and the Mulayam Singh government has taken the additional precaution of having the Assembly clear it as well, so that succeeding governments are bound to it.

The policy provides for developers to create townships involving at least Rs 750 crore in a 5-year timeframe and exempts developers from paying stamp duty.

The UP Investment Centre offers a single-window clearance for foreign investment, charted along the lines of the India Investment Centre set up in the Finance Ministry in the old days. The power policy has been rewritten and endorsed by the Assembly.

"We are a government in a hurry" said Amar Singh at a press conference recently. "We want to take decisions quickly". Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh together met the prime minister and the deputy prime minister recently and told them that the state government could give environmental clearance only to projects worth upto Rs 500 crore.

With Reliance Industries announcing setting up the biggest power project in the world in UP, could the centre speed up the process ?

Where is all this development going to lead ? The Samajwadi Party appears to be slowly expanding its appeal and trying to change its image from being merely a party of the unwashed masses, to one that will offer class mobility to urban and semi-urban families.

In UP which brings a rural outlook even to its towns, this is an aspiration that is at once frightening and promising. There was a time when the Mulayam Singh Government itself had begun to equate nationalism with the ability to speak Hindi and had announced that English-medium schools would be closed.

He doesn't talk about this any more. Instead there is cautious talk of letting the private sector in where it has never been before. Denotifying those district headquarters that Mayawati had created is justified on the ground that the state doesn't want to waste money on multiple administrative entities.

The difference between the old Mulayam Singh Yadav and the new one is however glaring. The old Mulayam would talk a lot "" and it was talking that got him into trouble. The whole Uttaranchal agitation and a separate state was the result of one throwaway remark by him. The ban on proliferation of English medium schools was more rhetoric than an actual ban.

This time, Mulayam is actually doing things he thinks should be done. Policies are being put in place and projects are being re-evaluated but not cancelled. No, corruption isn't down, and law and order needs to be tightened. But there is a sense that things in UP are moving.

Mulayam Singh is creating his own version of Chandrababu Naidu and the de-ruralification of UP. So the WEF in Lucknow, not Davos, is the dream. If Naidu can do it, reckons Mulayam, so can he. Whether his government is in place long enough remains to be seen.