In 30 Seconds
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In March 2012, for the first time since 1991, a single party won an outright majority in the Uttar Pradesh assembly, and it did so behind a candidate for chief minister who had never held the office his father had held three times. The Samajwadi Party’s two hundred and twenty four seats in a house of four hundred and three, won against an incumbent with her own full majority, closed the state’s two decade era of hung houses and coalitions, transferred a dynasty’s leadership in the victory’s glow, and set up both the era of achievement and the catastrophe of 2017 that this batch has already narrated from the far side. The landslide’s anatomy is the batch’s closing file.
The incumbent’s vulnerabilities were the campaign’s raw material. Mayawati’s 2007 to 2012 government, the next batch gives the era its own files, had banked its historic sarvajan majority and spent the term, in the opposition’s telling and much of the press record, on the memorials and statues whose costs became the era’s symbol, while the scandals the period generated, the health mission corruption that drew central investigation among them, and the government’s distance, the chief minister’s famously inaccessible style, gave the challenger’s campaign its target, arrogance, the argument ran, in sandstone. The BSP’s own base held with the loyalty the next batch explains, but the coalition’s upper caste and most backward extensions, rented in 2007, stood ready to move, and the state’s young, the demographic bulge entering the rolls by the tens of lakhs, belonged to whoever spoke their language first.
The challenger’s campaign spoke it deliberately. Akhilesh Yadav’s kranti rath, the customised bus tour launched in 2011, carried the young face through the state for months, the crowds building as the tour ran, and the persona did work the party’s reputation could not, the engineer promising laptops, English, and jobs from the platform of a machine the electorate associated with the batch’s earlier files, while the campaign’s discipline supplied the credibility the promise needed, the leadership publicly refusing entry and tickets to figures whose names carried the goondaraj charge, the turning away of a notorious western UP strongman becoming the campaign’s most reported single decision, a cleansing performed, sceptics noted, precisely because the stain was real, and effective, the results showed, regardless. The manifesto’s laptops and allowances gave the young voter a concrete stake, the Muslim consolidation returned to the shelter after flirtations the previous batch described, and the father’s machine, the booth structure of the Yadav belt, did what it had always done, the old arithmetic and the new persona compounding.
The count of March 6 exceeded every projection, two hundred and twenty four seats on close to thirty percent of the vote, the BSP falling to eighty, the BJP and Congress to the margins their era’s files record, and the succession that followed within days completed the story the state had actually voted on, Mulayam Singh Yadav, eligible for a fourth term and expected by many of his own to take it, announcing instead that the chief ministership would go to his son, the patriarch reading, by the accounts of the party’s councils, both the mandate’s authorship and the moment’s demography, and the swearing in at thirty eight installing the youngest chief minister in the state’s history at the head of its first majority government in twenty one years, the generational transfer the feud of 2016 would later contest sealed, in 2012, by victory.
For the UP Files, the landslide carries the batch’s summary lessons. It proved the state’s hung era was appetite rather than fate, the electorate ready to hand full power to whoever assembled a credible offer, a readiness the BJP would exploit at even greater scale five years later. It proved the dynasty’s renewal could be its greatest asset, the family firm marketing its second generation as change itself. And it set the bar its own government would be measured against, the majority that promised the moderniser everything leaving him, in 2017, nowhere to point but at himself, the audit the previous article entered. The rival machine the landslide buried, the elephant of the Bahujan movement, and the extraordinary woman who built and rode it, take the series’ stage in the next batch, and the UP Files turns from the house of Mulayam to the house Kanshi Ram built.
