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Column It looks like 1967, but with a big difference Inder Malhotra | Contributing my mite to the avalanche of comments on Mayawati's momentous victory — contrary to all "expert" expectations — in UP's historic Assembly election, let me begin with a confession. It seems that the time machine has leapt back four decades and we are where we were in 1967, though with a very important difference. In the fourth general election in that year, the Congress had retained a relatively small majority in Parliament but lost the Assemblies of all eight northern states, and — please forgive me for repeating this — one could travel all the way from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Amritsar without having to traverse a single inch of Congress-governed territory. Read more hard-hitting columns To be sure, today anyone going from West Bengal to Punjab's holy city would have to pass through Delhi and Haryana, which are currently under Congress rule, but that is a minor matter. The profound difference between then and now is that 40 years ago, everybody knew that the cacophonic, all-embracing coalitions, from the extreme left to the communal right, that had replaced the Congress were bound to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. And so they did. Indira Gandhi, then busy dividing the Indian National Congress to put the party bosses in their place, won back most of these states. Where the electorate did not oblige, there was the governor, acting under the most misused Article 356 of the Constitution. This time around, the Leftists are firmly entrenched in West Bengal. So is Biju Janata Dal, with the BJP playing a second fiddle in Orissa. Nitish Kumar, also with the saffron party playing a secondary role, is firmly in the saddle in Bihar. Consequently, the meaning of Mayawati's massive majority in UP should be clear even to the meanest intelligence. In fact, the main reason why the Bahujan Samaj Party leader has prevailed so decisively is that she alone understood the need for a change in attitude and strategy in changing circumstances. No one could have forgotten that her (and her mentor, the late Kanshi Ram's) original slogan was tilak, tarazu aur talwar — the reference being to Brahmins with caste marks on their foreheads, the Bania trading caste, and the sword-swinging Rajputs — unko maro jotee char (they should all be given shoe-beating four times)." How far she has come since then! Her party and its members who took the oath as ministers on Sunday are a rainbow coalition of Dalits, Brahmins, Banias, Muslims and others. The sheer dimension of this change is mind-boggling. By contrast all her major opponents — the outgoing ruling party, the Samajwadi, the BJP and the Congress — remained mired in the outdated, archaic, mindset that caste, indeed the mobilisation of a single caste, would do the trick, with some help from crime and cash. Those that remain so imprisoned in the dead past are bound to lose the future, as we have seen. There is one crucial distinction between Mayawati's style of choosing her candidates and that of other parties. It is no secret that in the past she is known to have virtually "auctioned" the seats she was confident of wining, which is something other parties and their leaders also do. But her strong point is that, despite her towering stature, she does take into account the sentiments of her followers. The constituency has some say in the choice of its candidate. All other parties, taking a cue from the Congress in the Fifties, are holding fast to the "principle" of choosing all candidates from one corner of the country to the other only at the party's central headquarters in New Delhi. This is not democracy, but negation of it. Remarkably, all exit and opinion polls on TV channels — unanimous in predicting a "hung House" in Lucknow — gave the second position to the BJP. What has actually happened is that the outgoing ruling party, SP, has retained the second position while the saffron party's present strength has plummeted to nearly half of its previous one. An important reason for this is the disgraceful compact disc (CD) that it first issued as election propaganda, later tried to disown but not condemn, and eventually deplored it when it was too late. It is worth applauding that the voters of UP have rejected not only hate-filled Hindutva, but also the United Front some regressive Muslim organisations had hurriedly rigged up. In a day and age when the bulk of political parties are "family businesses," it stood to reason that the Congress should have relied on Rahul Gandhi as their ace, if not the sole, campaigner. Its belief that his charisma would boost the party's fortunes was badly belied. Instead of capturing 40 or even 45 seats, it has lost three seats out of its measly tally of 25 in 2002, and its share of vote has dwindled to just over eight per cent, despite the competitive hype and hoopla made by TV channels over his "road show." In other words, the present performance of Congress' "future hope" is nothing to write home about, notwithstanding his unnecessary boast of his "family" having "broken Pakistan into two." There is nothing to show that either this, or his declaration that the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished had a Gandhi been at the helm at that time has made any impact on the Muslim vote. Of the superlatives a host of Congressmen, including Union Cabinet ministers, are using about him, the less said the better. An account of the UP elections cannot be complete without taking note of the deflation of Bollywood bigwigs constantly supporting the Samajwadi Party regime, and the manifest panic among the crony capitalists who have made hay while the sun shone on the Mulayam Singh-Amar Singh duo. At the same time, it is altogether typical that the Centre's income-tax authorities raided some of the wealthy backers of the Samajwadi Party just a day before the counting of the votes. Moneybags and politicians may be inseparable. But couldn't the greatest icon of the Indian cinema refrain from propagating misleading TV ads, making out Mulayam's UP to be the epitome of lawfulness? -- Subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a BLANK email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join Yahoo! 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