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Un-Predictable, that's UP I have often expressed my deep scepticism about opinion polls, although I must admit that they do make compelling reading or viewing. Rarely have these cursory sample surveys, usually churned out by a host of fly-by-night operators, turned out accurate. There are a variety of reasons why opinion polls serve no other purpose than provide artificial excitement to politicians and journalists. These polls usually fail to reflect the eventual outcome because, among other things, Indians are compulsive liars. We refuse to divulge our preferences in public, so much so that people come out of a polling booth and still lie about whom they voted for! Ours is the only country where even exit polls are routinely known to go wrong. International polling organisations of repute, such as Gallup, are yet to set up shop in India despite ours being the world's biggest democracy and the business prospect of roping in a plethora of media houses as clients ought to be attractive. Such firms only provide technical consultancy to some polling or market research outfits, but baulk at the thought of accepting full responsibility for the outcome. It, therefore, amuses me when rag-tag pollsters confidently assert that their results are liable to a margin of error merely between three and five per cent. A new trend among India's hoax pollsters (we would call them ponga-pundits in Hindi) is to forecast virtually identical number of seats for the two contending alliances and then cover the relevant part of their anatomy by draping themselves in the "error margin" diaper! A majority of opinion/exit polls published during the recent Punjab and Uttarakhand Assembly elections would testify to the validity of my assertion. Without an iota of shame, the very same poll hoaxers appear in TV shows on result day to loudly cheer themselves for "getting it right"! Even if I were to give them the occasional benefit of the doubt, I would not take their polls at all seriously with respect to Uttar Pradesh. Un-Predictable, that's what UP stands for. Who forms the Government in Lucknow does not depend any longer on which party wins how many seats but on post-poll wheels and deals. These involve ideological flexibility, political promiscuity, pecuniary profligacy, numerical intricacy, 'suitcase' diplomacy - the list of 'skills' can be endless. The last Assembly election won by a single party in UP was in 1991, when the BJP stormed into power riding the crest of the Ram Mandir wave. The party had to sacrifice its Government in 1992 when the "dilapidated, disputed structure" at Ayodhya was brought crashing down by determined kar sewaks. In the mid-term elections that ensued in 1993, the Samajwadi Party struck a pre-poll alliance with the fledgling Bahujan Samaj Party. The unorthodox, and hence short-lived, tie-up lasted just over a year with Mayawati pulling out of the coalition to become Chief Minister for the first time with BJP support, a feat she has repeated thrice thereafter. Since then, nobody's won an Assembly election in UP, although the BJP performed spectacularly in the 1998 Lok Sabha poll, winning 57, plus three more if allies are counted, of the State's (then) 84 seats. That the party crashed to 26 seats in the 1999 poll, and thereafter to a pathetic 11in 2004, is another matter. Similarly, the Samajwadi Party with 40 MPs notched up exactly half of UP's current Lok Sabha seats in 2004, but had managed to win only 145 out of 403 Vidhan Sabha seats in 2002. In other words, it is not necessary that a party win a majority of seats to rule Uttar Pradesh. Kalyan Singh, followed by the disastrous Ram Prakash Gupta experiment before the reins were handed over to Rajnath Singh, ruled the State for almost five years cobbling together a majority in the Assembly after Mayawati broke the deal. The party looked the other way in 2002 and allowed Mulayam Singh to break Mayawati's party and come to power. At the last hustings, the BJP had a pre-poll alliance with Ajit Singh's RLD. Together, they tallied 103 seats. But within days of Mayawati's quitting the job, Ajit Singh did what he is best at - yet another political somersault to join hands with Mulayam Singh. That his effort to ingratiate himself to the Congress was dismissively rebuffed by Rahul Gandhi speaks volumes for the fluidity of political alignments in the State. You may well be wondering about the purpose of presenting such a compilation of psephological and political data. I have just one fundamental point to establish: Predicting the electoral outcome in UP today is not just difficult but simply impossible. I say this with considerable experience, having covered nearly a dozen polls in that State since 1984. Life was simpler till the mid-90s. Uttar Pradesh responded to issues, be it the Emergency when the Congress lost all seats, or 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi decimated the Opposition although Charan Singh hung on to the State's western districts. Then came Rajiv's rout, the BJP's ascendancy and, thereafter, Mayawati played havoc with settled poll punditry. Her strategy of choosing upper caste candidates while ensuring continued sway over Dalit votes has altered the mosaic of UP's electoral arithmetic. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I believe UP's erstwhile caste polarisation is dissipating. It can no longer be asserted with certainty that a Brahmin will necessarily vote for the BJP or Congress, that the Thakurs are committed to saffron, that Kurmis will ditto what their bigger OBC compatriots, namely the Yadavs, dictate or that all Muslims will mindlessly rally behind Mulayam. In that sense, Mayawati has broken the mould of UP's caste politics - for better or worse only time will tell. By choosing a majority of candidates from non-Dalit categories, and ensuring many of them win by drawing a sizeable vote from their own community in addition to her "transferable" Dalit vote, she has rewritten the grammar of UP elections, making it a truly unpredictable State. As a result, "jatiya sameekaran" (caste configuration), the all-encompassing byword for projecting outcomes has turned topsy-turvy. Electoral realities vary from constituency to constituency, caste alignments change over a radius of 15 km, how a Brahmin votes in constituency number 115 may vary widely with what his fellow castemen do in 116. Arguably, some caste patterns are still discernable. For example, I believe Mulayam's Muslim-Yadav combine is holding, which could catapult the Samajwadis into the Assembly's single largest slot, just as Mayawati's Dalit base and the BJP's Brahmin appeal appear undiminished. But established caste blocs are also breaking up, as Nitish Kumar proved by capturing the non-Yadav OBC/EBC (Extremely Backward Classes) vote in Bihar. Apna Dal's Sonelal Patel in alliance with the BJP, and Mulayam's estranged cohort Beniprasad Verma with his Samajwadi Kranti Dal, hopes to add to this fracturing. Un-Predictable UP will probably have to undergo another decade of ungovernability as caste blocs shatter or, better still, the unwieldy State gets broken up into four more political units on the lines of Uttarakhand.
