Uttar Pradesh and its 'powerless' CM

The Hakka Bakka! Gent’s Hairdressing Saloon at the corner of Gomtinagar, one of the upmarket localities in Lucknow, is probably the only barbershop in the world that has an exclamation mark in its name. 

Pictures of youthful Rajesh Khanna, Dilip Kumar and Raj Babbar adorn the walls. “We turn them,” says the proprietor sotto voce, jerking his head in the direction of a pimply youth, urging the barber to give him a Mohawk cut “into them”. Every street corner in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (UP),  offer similar improbable promises. “Get a degree! No exam needed”, screams a hoarding, with a mobile number. Another offers treatment to childless couples that will ‘give results in 48 hours’. It is a city where a fool and his money can be parted very quickly, indeed. The government doesn’t come into the picture.

 

Muzaffar Ali, filmmaker, artist and a Lucknow “boy” (even at 72), however, has not given up hope. Last week, he held a press conference to plead with the government for justice: a 10-acre parcel of his ancestral land (of which, he has already sold 6 acres to developers) is being claimed by the forest department as forest land despite the verdict of a commission (set up by the government and headed by a serving officer) in his favour. Ali is not just a Padma Shree, he is also an extended arm of the government with a hotline to the chief minister (CM), who is extremely fond of him. All he wants is that the government should act on its own recommendations.   

Bemused reporters asked him why he was not approaching the CM instead of taking the dispute to the press. “I like the CM and I do not blame him for anything” said Ali. “But there are some in his government who are misleading him”. He refused to say who the others were and would neither confirm nor deny that it was Anita Singh, a 1990 batch IAS officer, who was tasked in 2012 by Mulayam Singh to ‘tutor’ his son when he became CM. This phrase ‘misleading’ recurs. UP has had five and a half chief ministers. Quite apart from chief ministers and their proxies, there are a dozen power centres. Each radiates his own power trajectory to illumine the path and enlarge his sphere of influence. The innocent can get hopelessly lost.

Former Chief Secretary of UP, Deepak Singhal, is certainly not innocent. Neither is he some junior officer who can be transferred at will. But his presence at a party, hosted by Amar Singh (who famously ‘saved’ Mulayam Singh from going to jail), was reported by every newspaper. Irritated, Akhilesh removed him from his job. Amar Singh’s supporters reached Mulayam Singh to complain how even private parties and the presence of bureaucrats there had become a subject of politics. The father called the son and asked him to reverse the action. 

Worse followed. It was a holiday. No typists were available. So, a typist and a computer were procured by Mulayam’s associates and a letter was sent to Akhilesh. The action communicated to him what it was supposed to: that he might be the CM but there were other forces, bigger than him. This made him extremely angry and he told his father he would be seen as quixotic, sacking senior officers and then reinstating them. “I can’t do it now, I will do it later” he is reported to have told Mulayam. This caused the father to flare up and others behind the scene to fan the flames. The result was Mulayam Singh’s public attack on his chief minister son last month. But the fact remains that in UP, a chief minister was unable to appoint his own chief secretary. Mulayam Singh made two or three charges against his son. One was that the liquor mafia is being aided by those in power. Akhilesh supporters are still trying to work out how. The government controls the liquor trade through a policy. Licences to operate liquor shops are auctioned. No substantive changes have been made in the policy since 2014; but obviously someone wanted changes and got Mulayam Singh to make the charge that he did, expecting Akhilesh would tweak the policy. He has shown no sign of doing so.

The biggest weakness of the government is its indulgence towards Yadavs, especially those in positions of responsibility. “We have told the CM that the government must show itself as caste-neutral. If a Yadav is reported to be abusing power, he must be punished as stringently as a non-Yadav” an official said, acknowledging that this is a problem. 

Monu Gupta, 20, who plies an auto rickshaw and doesn’t miss a trick, guffawed when he saw a woman engaged in a tug of war with an enormously fat monkey who was determined to divest her of brightly coloured dupatta. “Watch !” he said excitedly. “The monkey will win because he has the government on his side”. The woman won, but the dupatta was in shreds. That’s Uttar Pradesh for you.