By Amitabh Ranjan
Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, voted on June 1 in the seventh and last phase of the 2024 general election. On May 30, when the curtains came down on campaigning, Modi was addressing his last rally in Hoshiarpur in Punjab. In his constituency, a posse of BJP top leaders led by his Man Friday Amit Shah was holding the fort at ground zero with characteristic nonchalance. For, there was no fight. “Koi fight nahi hai”. The only question remained how much more than the last time would be the winning margin. And, as the cliché goes, rest is history.
It’s not only Modi’s much lower victory margin, that too after a scare in the initial rounds of counting, that has the BJP leadership eating crow. Ayodhya, Sitapur, Shravasti and Uttar Pradesh in general were a shocker for them. In fact, it won’t be far off the mark if one were to say that the outcome in UP decided that the BJP’s ‘370-paar’ would fall much below even the simple majority mark of 272.
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India’s most populous state that sends 80 MPs to Lok Sabha (85 when Uttarakhand was part of it) has been a bellwether in deciding which party or coalition will rule from New Delhi. Obviously,\ therefore, the state has been handled with much caution by the dispensation at the Centre. The state itself has been a veritable quarry of politicians of all hues, their politics and ideologies. A lab where the most potent form of socialist and caste politics took roots and flowered, it has been also the epicentre of saffron surge. A consolidated work on Uttar Pradesh’s electoral evolution would be an interesting read any day only that it was yet to be worked upon.
Shyamlal Yadav’s At the Heart of Power: The Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh has achieved just that. In 21 chapters, the author tells the stories of as many persons and their personas who have occupied the highest seat of power in the state. From Govind Ballabh Pant, a lawyer, freedom fighter and member of the Constituent Assembly; to Sucheta Kripalani, the first woman chief minister in the country; to Chaudhary Charan Singh, the first non-Congress chief minister of UP; to Mulayam Singh Yadav who ensured that our own grand old party was reduced to a footnote in the state’s politics; to Kalyan Singh, the state’s first BJP CM; to Mayawati, a trailblazer in Dalit politics; to Yogi Adityanath scripting a new era, the book is a veritable mélange of characters, their strengths and follies, ideologies and idiosyncrasies and, in all cases, a quest for power. It goes to the author’s credit that he pulls quite a few not-so-popular names from the political quicksand to record their tenures on the state’s highest post.
Replete with anecdotes, the book is remarkable for the painstaking research that has gone into it. Despite a few proof-reading hiccups, the language is simple and direct. A feted and one of the most prolific investigative journalists in the country, Shyamlal brings to the fore his story-telling skills to take you through a complex socio-political landscape. He goes beyond character sketches. Cogently and dispassionately, the book offers a rare perspective into the political evolution of the most populous state since the first elections in independent India. It takes you through palace intrigues and politicking, the Congress’ fall from prominence, saffron’s initial hobnobbing with electoral turnstile till it firmly takes centrestage, the theatre where socialism found its most impressive play, and the culmination of a long struggle waged by Scheduled Castes to have a share in the power pie.
In the preface to the book, Shyamlal says that the idea of the book was derived by the realisation that a “consolidated account of the pedigree, personality, politics, promises, programmes and patrimony of the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh did not exist”. The book fills that gap, and does it commendably. More importantly, it comes at a time when the party in power in Uttar Pradesh is yet to have the last word on why it fared much below its expectation in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls.
Amitabh Ranjan is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College.
At the Heart of Power: The Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh
Shyamlal Yadav
Rupa Publications
Pp 320, Rs 395
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