The peril that is Uttar Pradesh

By RN Bhaskar

Image generated using https://deepai.org/

Look at Uttar Pradesh from any angle. There is just no way it could have been propelled to become one of the top ten GDP states in India (free subscription — https://bhaskarr.substack.com/p/tilting-the-scales-to-suit-north).  Similarly, there is no way in which it could have become the country’s top tax-paying state either. Some sort of jugglery appears to be at work.

But then, this is not the first time that Uttar Pradesh has benefitted from leeching on the exchequer.  Remember how, from 1981 till 2019, even the income taxes of ministers were being paid by the exchequer.  This practice was abolished in 2019.  But now there are other ways that states in North India, in particularly Uttar Pradesh, continue to benefit.

Central government greed as well

The share of funds for Southern states has been whittled down, even though they are major contributors to the national tax pool. In sharp contrast, the share for Northern states has been increased. The centre has kept ever increasing share of funds with itself and for its own discretionary spending.

What one needs to do is to just add up all the special disbursements by the centre for special projects like Ayodhya.  That is when one realises that the amounts bestowed on Uttar Pradesh are so large, that they have allowed the state (along with other BIMARU states) to emerge as one of the top 10 GDP generators (free subscription – https://bhaskarr.substack.com/p/tilting-the-scales-to-suit-north). Uttar Pradesh has also become the top taxpayer in the country. The BIMARU group is an acronym for some of the most financially-weak and even sickly states and comprise Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan as the other three constituents.

These are states that are marked by poor education, poverty and even a nauseating mindset with which they treat women.

Education

The BIMARU states, including Uttar Pradesh, are among the most fundamentalist in India.  This is where abundant numbers of people are always available to join rent-a-mob crowds.  They are states where communal disharmony flares up periodically, abetted covertly, and sometimes overtly as well, by politicians across the spectrum. These are the states that have the most retrograde throughs about women as can be seen from recent headlines in leading newspapers.

Uttar Pradesh is one of the worst among the BIMARU states – bulldozer deaths, encounter killings, and a disdain for the basics of law.

Rapes as well

The picture becomes breaker when one looks at some of the most prominent rape cases in the country.  Recently, the Supreme Court had to haul up a judge who instead of sentencing a criminal, admonished the victim, telling her that she was asking for it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXasL-RJutk).

When it comes to crimes against women and children, this state sports the most horrifying of records. In many cases, while the crime rate went down across the country, in Uttar Pradesh it increased.

In some cases, the rapes have been so gruesome that they make the stomach churn.  In almost all of them, the victim and her family (in some cases the victim died) got justice only when the case was taken away from the state courts and were examined by the Supreme Court.  In some cases, where the matter did not reach the Supreme Court, the culprits were let off on the grounds that evidence in the case was inadequate and hence a clinching verdict could not be given.

The rot in the social fabric is also evident when one looks at developments following the gruesome rapes in a child care institution (CCI) in Bihar.  The childcare centre was being managed by politicians who took the minor girls out for their own pleasure.

Sickened by this case, the Supreme Court ordered all the CCIs in the country to be investigated, and put the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) as the nodal agency to ensure that the investigations were done properly (https://asiaconverge.com/2021/07/hindi-belt-ii-crimes-against-children-and-against-humanity/). When the investigation reports were compiled, it was found that the only state that did not allow such investigations was Uttar Pradesh.

The apex court was duly informed of this – that as many as 34 homes in Uttar Pradesh were not covered by this exercise in accordance with a request to this effect by the state government.  The report remains incomplete to this date.

When the minister in charge of Women and Child Welfare was asked in July 2021 if there had been any follow-up in this matter, the response was a stony silence.

Even the much-vaunted do-gooders like Kailash Satyarthi (who shared a Nobel Award with Malala from Pakistan), refused to comment on this matter.  There is a thick veil of silence surrounding sex crimes in Uttar Pradesh.

A carefully crafted attempt to exploit

How much of the depravity and exploitation can be attributed to the absence of learning?   There are good reasons to believe that even the absence of focus on education is part of a grand strategy to keep people backward so that the powerful and the privileged can have more opportunities to exploit and plunder.

Consider the way key judicial positions are kept vacant.  By not filling in these vacancies, the government has ensured that cases take a longer time to hear. This in turn deters victims from approaching the courts for redressal.  The reluctance to appoint police officers appears to have been motivated by similar calculations.

Not surprisingly, even chief ministers like to take laws into their own hand.  How else do you explain bulldozer justice, or encounter deaths.  Uttar Pradesh is full of such stories.  It is patriarchal, and abounds in lumpenism, greed and lust all rolled into one.

That is one more reason why the BIMARU states should not be permitted to have a higher vote share than that they currently control.  With the existing levels of votes, the politicians are already heady with power. They thus abet crimes against women and children. Farmers are exploited all the time (https://asiaconverge.com/2021/08/poverty-in-uttar-pradesh-and-bihar-is-not-accidental/). It is therefore not surprising that this state’s farmers get some of the lowest prices for the milk and sugarcane they produce.

That is also the reason why the moves by the government and Niti Aayog to try show Uttar Pradesh as the fastest growing state, and one which should be admired, is both tragic and a travesty.  Sadly, the political gains from such destructive stratagems appear to have afflicted even ponce-progressive states like Maharashtra (free subscription — https://bhaskarr.substack.com/p/is-maharashtra-going-the-uttar-pradesh).

Unless, the norms of fiscal responsibility are reintroduced in the guidelines for the Finance Commission (free subscription — https://bhaskarr.substack.com/p/the-finance-commission-becomes-ineffectual), Uttar Pradesh will continue to get drunk on money, power and sleaze. It must stop, even if means dismissing the state government.

That is also another reason why the Southern states have a very strong case to protest the delimitation exercise.  You cannot have parasitic states, sucking away at the pool of funds that hard working states have collected through enterprise, law and order, social responsibility and progressive thinking.  This depravity must stop if India has to progress.  It must stop if this nation has to guard against splintering into bits and pieces once again.

It is the only long-term solution to racial and communal harmony, and a humane approach to all fellow citizens.

============

Do watch my latest podcast on the proposed delimitation in India. It can be found at https://youtu.be/4RPgaohYZhQ .

=================

And do watch our “News behind the News” podcast every morning at 8:15 am IST on weekdays.  We provide insights that few other channels offer. You can find the latest episode at https://www.youtube.com/live/8QU2aBz5R18?si=R2KtT5kfdAkP8Viy

================