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Across four terms and roughly a dozen years in aggregate, from the wave government of 1989 to the son’s landslide administration ending in 2017, the Samajwadi Party governed Uttar Pradesh, and around its record two irreconcilable summaries harden at every election, the party’s own, of welfare and works for the common man, and the opposition’s single devastating word, goondaraj, the rule of the strongman. This audit article does what the series’ audit articles do, sets both summaries against the record each draws on, and lets the ledger’s columns stand where the evidence puts them.
The welfare and works column is real and underargued by the party’s enemies. The SP terms produced the era’s most recognisable direct benefit architecture, the unemployment allowance and the kanya vidya dhan for girls’ schooling in the 2003 to 2007 term, the laptop distributions of the 2012 government that put machines in the hands of village toppers by the lakh, the samajwadi pension reaching the poorest households, and the ambulance fleets whose call numbers became, the batch’s sixth article noted, part of the state’s spoken language, welfare designed, the political scientists observed, for visibility and delivered, the evaluations broadly agreed, with reach the state’s earlier schemes had not managed. The works column peaked in the son’s term, the Agra Lucknow expressway completed at a pace the state’s engineers still cite, the Lucknow metro begun, the power sector’s capacity and procurement reforms that lifted supply hours measurably, and the Lohia rural housing and village programmes extending the founder’s iconography into the hamlets, a build record on which the 2017 campaign ran and, the next batch records, lost.
The goondaraj column must be stated with the same discipline. The charge, pressed by the BSP and BJP throughout and echoed in the period’s press, held that SP rule meant the machine’s men unbound, and its evidence ran from the documented to the atmospheric, the crime registers of the terms showing surges in the categories the public feels, the era’s signature scandals, land and mining rackets under political protection that the courts and central agencies pursued into the party’s networks, the accommodation of strongman legislators the crime batches name within the court record, the police postings market and the thana’s capture by the locally dominant, and the riots, above all, the 2012 to 2017 term’s communal count, with Muzaffarnagar 2013 as its catastrophe, standing in the National Crime Records Bureau tables and the commission findings the communal batch will cite. The party’s answers belong beside the charge, that the categories surged with reporting reforms as much as crime, that its rivals’ terms kept their own registers, the encounter era’s costs the police batch audits, that the strongman accommodation was the whole system’s practice rather than one party’s, and that goondaraj was, above all, a campaign word, the perception war’s winner rather than the statistics’. The series’ finding, such as it is, is the one the evidence supports, that the perception was built on real material and then outran it, and that in the heartland’s politics perception, once set, votes.
The record’s structural page is the one both summaries skip. The SP terms coincided with the state’s continued slide down the national league tables this series’ economy batch documents, investment, jobs, and human development trailing the southern and western states regardless of Lucknow’s occupant, and the party’s governments, like their rivals’, governed the drift more than they reversed it, the welfare architecture cushioning what the growth architecture did not create, a verdict that belongs to the state’s whole political class and is entered here against one party only because this is that party’s audit.
For the UP Files, the Samajwadi record is the era’s test case of Mandal in office, representation delivered, welfare delivered, the deeper transformation deferred, and the law and order flank left open for the rival current’s counterattack. The machine’s finest hour at the ballot box, the landslide that closed the era’s first act and opened its second generation, is the batch’s final file.
