India's most populous state is in a state of chaos, split it

UP has always been among India's worst governed states.

By Aditya Sinha

Published: Tue 2 Oct 2018, 8:45 PM

Last updated: Tue 2 Oct 2018, 10:47 PM

On early Saturday, 38-year-old Apple executive Vivek Tewari was shot dead by police in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest and most lawless state. He and a friend were in his SUV; the cops, not in uniform, tried flagging them down. Tewari, perhaps scared of a carjacking, fled but was shot in the chin and bled to death. The UP police opened an investigation and arrested the two policemen. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath has been under fire on social media - though that might have less to do with the victim's human rights and more to do with the fact that he is Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah's main challenger to lead the party once Prime Minister Narendra Modi eventually calls it a day.
Adityanath has a problem on his hands: the victim was a Brahmin. UP, like much of India, is highly caste-conscious, and Brahmins constitute a sizeable 14 per cent of the population. As a community, Brahmins are core voters of the BJP. However, they are not fond of the more martial Thakurs. Adityanath is originally a Thakur though as a priest he discarded that identity. He is certainly not keen to allow this caste division to fester - Tewari's wife made televised statements against the police, saying she did not expect this sort of arbitrary execution in UP (ironically, she said this is sort of thing that should only happen in the conflict-torn, Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir). "This is not what we voted the BJP for," she said. No wonder the administration has been unusually responsive to the victim's family, though Tewari's young daughter has let the cat out of the bag, telling TV news channels that the administration had been pressuring her family to go easy.
The fact is that this police execution has happened before in UP. The state's other administrations - either of the Samajwadi Party (which has many dons of ill-repute in its ranks) or of the Bahujan Samaj Party (whose primary concern was its dalit voters) - have been no better. UP is a lawless state. Its police is a law unto itself, using its uniform to extort, torture and kill with impunity. It is so bad that many neighbours chose our suburb of Gurgaon, in Haryana, over the suburb of Noida or Ghaziabad, in UP, because of UP's anarchy. UP's police is bad; its politicians are gangsters; its bureaucrats are corrupt; its businesses are shady; its lower judiciary law-illiterate; and its citizens, as a result, are rough. I am wary of various relatives who have long lived in the state.
UP has always been among India's worst governed states. If it were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world in terms of population. It is at the bottom of per capita income and in almost every human resource index. Its once reputable universities are now a pale shadow of themselves. The state is crowded and dirty. It has no real industry, and even Modi's plan of building a defence production corridor between Agra and Lucknow has stalled. Traditional industries like leather and weaving have suffered due to communal disharmony unleashed by BJP supporters since 2013. Other states, especially in the South, resent UP for the influence it wields on pan-Indian affairs.
Over the years, there have been suggestions to divide UP into several states. Though there is no correlation between how big a state is and how well it is administered - India's best administered states include large ones like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka - in UP's case it would be a good idea. Anyone who travels from Ghaziabad to Gorakhpur may wonder how any man - particularly in Indian political parties, which tend to centralise power in the chief executive - could manage what is going on, even in a basic matter like law and order.
Mayawati had as chief minister in 2011 passed a resolution in the state assembly to divide UP into four states: its eastern part as Purvanchal, the west as Harit Pradesh, the central chunk as Awadh, and the southern strip as Bundelkhand. She lost the 2012 state election and the Congress government at the Centre let the resolution die. Before the 2017 state election, rightwing websites raised the matter, but once the BJP won a three-fourths majority, they forgot all about it. A mainstream website revived the suggestion, but it did not catch on. Incidentally, both quoted from BR Ambedkar's 1955 proposal to divide UP into three states. But Modi, the parliamentarian from eastern UP, shows no inclination for reforming UP.
UP is a behemoth. Forget the politics: no one can change this state. UP is industrially backward; any party in power has to rely on patronage-networks, government contracts and administration jobs. But the murder of an Apple executive by police - empowered by their chief minister to thoko (hit) any suspects - should open everyone's eyes to the need to reorganise this state into several manageable units. Only then will its citizens feel it is liveable, and other Indian states will stop thinking they are held hostage by it.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India and author, most recently, of 'The Spy Chronicles: Raw, ISI and the Illusion of Peace'