The rediscovery of USHV: Phase 3 Election Report
“We have all been rendered powerless since yesterday” Rambhau Pandey had rued that night, “all of us are Savarnas”, he had further gone on to underscore. This was a story that very few people know about; the great village purge of the 90’s Uttar Pradesh. “19,000 Gram Panchayat Pradhans have been eliminated by the government, 70% of them were savarnas, remaining were other OBCs”, Pandey ji had explained. The Mulayam government, had almost overnight, undertaken a delimitation exercise of the local Panchayats and had, for the first time, brought down the total number of Panchayats from 74,000 to about 55,000 – delimitation exercise generally only changes the boundaries of a constituency/panchayat while the overall numbers remain the same, but here he had blatantly eliminated panchayats that were not ruled by his caste brethren.
It was the great Mandal-Mulayam blueprint of concentrating power and financial resources in the hands of Yadavs starting from the village unit. If you thought Mandal politics was all about reservations, think again. It was all about transferring power and money into the hands of Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This is how the Yadavs came on to the power position in the heartland. Mulayam had essentially cracked open the Panchayati Raj system and turned it into a vehicle for power. Huge budgetary allocations were then given to the Panchayats by the government and all the thekas and permits were cornered by the Yadavs through a systematically channelized governance model.
Both Mulayam and Lalu then forged an alliance of Yadavs and Muslims in the villages and towns to create a block of roughly 30% votes which was more than enough to win an election in multi-cornered fights by adding a mere 3-4% incremental vote to their blocks. This is how the famous MY combo held sway throughout the 90’s and 2000’s which almost completely blunted the BJP’s Hindutva plank. This total domination of Yadavs in the power-money system created a great deal of resentment among all other castes who began to slowly challenge the Mandal-Mulayam politics.
The first time this system was challenged was by Mayawati in 2007 when she famously created a bridge between Brahmins and Jatavs which was able to trounce the MY combo. The BJP and the RSS had sensed the nascent beginnings of a Hindu coalition in the heartland in 2007, but still lacked the demographic depth to penetrate the society as a whole. It was with the rise of Modi in 2014 that the true USHV – United Spectrum of Hindu Votes – coalition arose, and the rest, as they say is history.