India's most populous state is getting battle-ready for 2012. At stake is not just the future of Uttar Pradesh - as we know it - but also the political career of scions and stalwarts, and a host of ideologies that aspire to define India.

An election is as much about the future as it is about the past. It is as much about images - real or airbrushed - as it's about facts. In the spring of 2012, before the people of Uttar Pradesh head to the polling booths and data from EVMs is dissected on 24x7 channels , many images would be playing on the voters' minds.

Some already are: the scion of India's first political dynasty carrying the sepiatoned photo of his great-grandfather to "fulfill his unrealized dreams" in his " karmabhoomi" ; the original poster-boy of right-wing politics returning on a rath to the original laboratory of Hindutva to establish 'Ram Rajya' ; one of the first torch-bearers of Mandal politics fighting to save his OBC politics, and his own little dynasty; and a daughter of dalits, who, after ruling the state for five years, is now planning to slice it into four parts and possibly grab power in all of them. And then there is an old Gandhian activist who might be taking his fight against corruption to the electoral battlefield of 2012.

To call 2012 a "semi-final" for 2014 will be missing the point, and overuse of a silly cliche. Because every election, in any case, has a finality of its own. It has its own opening rounds, preliminaries, quarters, semis and final. What is happening, and will happen in Uttar Pradesh, that large swathe of unwieldy, heterogenous and confounding geography bigger and more populous than many "big" countries of the world, is much more than that.

At the end of 2011, after five years of chief minister Mayawati's single-party rule, the state today looks like a theme park, where conflicting images of shiny statues, F1 grid girls and swanky malls compete with angry farmers and small children dying of encephalitis . But UP has always been like that - a microcosm of India, with everything wrong and right in it - a theatre where dress rehearsals for national politics are carried out every five years.

A four-cornered contest is on course now where everyone is out to get everyone else. In the present assembly, Mayawati's BSP has 221 seats, followed by 88 of Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party, 48 of BJP and just 20 of the Congress. With no pre-poll alliance likely between these four, it may just be a repeat of 2007, when the BSP romped home on its own. "We are expecting some more seats due to anti-incumbency votes against the BSP, but to get 200-plus seats is tough," says a Congress leader who doesn't want to be named. "In the 2009 polls, Congress led early in 100 assembly seats. We hope to build on that momentum."

But 2012 is not 2009. A lot has changed since UP's last election. It is one of the few states doing well financially , bringing many more people above the poverty line. In the 11th five-year plan (2007-12 ), UP has registered 7.28% growth against the target of 6.10%. UP is no longer the elephant in the room.

What has not changed is Mayawati's faith in her social engineering formula that brought to power a rainbow coalition of dalits, Brahmins and Muslims. "That alliance is still intact, but Mayawati seems to be insecure and that's why the proposal to divide UP into four new states," says Rakesh Diwedi, a high court lawyer in Allahabad. "She has tripped all her rivals with this move. If she manages to put her four chief ministers here, her next stop will be Delhi."

But she faces a roadblock. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had put together an alliance of OBCs, led by Yadavs , and

Muslims and won two elections in the past, is working hard to win back the Muslims from the BSP. "I need your votes because the condition of Muslims has deteriorated during the BSP rule. Their condition is the worst in UP.

 It's worse even than the dalits," Mulayam said on Wednesday in his first rally at Etah in the run-up to the elections. Call it desperation , but the former CM went to the extent of hinting that SP leader Azam Khan could be the chief minister if his party came to power. But this kind of identity politics may have limited appeal now.

"People voted Mulayam out in 2007 because of misgovernance and a pathetic law-and-order situation and they haven't forgotten it. People's aspirations have changed. With Lalu Yadav finished in Bihar, this election will be a test of OBC politics in the hinterland," says a senior bureaucrat who doesn't want to be named.

In 2009, though Mulayam bagged 35 seats, it became clear that the ground under him was slipping. The Congress, which had won just 22 seats in the assembly polls two years earlier, won 22 Lok Sabha seats. "We realized that people wanted development and were not happy voting for their caste leaders. So we decided to focus on good governance," says the Congress leader. On November 14, as Rahul Gandhi kicked off his UP campaign with the promise of fulfilling the dreams of Jawaharlal Nehru, it became clear that the dynasty was keen to reclaim its territory with the development card. "If UP is won, Rahulji can move to a bigger role at the Centre," says the Congressman.

Development is not a bad strategy in a state where people are still craving for food, water, education and jobs. It also neutralizes the caste and communal cards. In Bundelkhand, there has been a war of words between the Centre and the state government with each trying to outsmart the other. While Mayawati's demand for a Rs 80,000-crore package was not met by the UPA government, Rahul Gandhi has been making frequent trips to the region to expose the non-implementation of Central schemes. "Whether in power or not, the Congress has always been demanding development in Bundelkhand. In these elections, employment and development will be the major agenda," says Union minister of state for rural development Pradeep Jain Aditya, the party's MP from Jhansi.

Though everybody loves to talk about development , few really take it up. And that has made people here cynical. "No political party has a pro-people ideology . The common man has been alienated from the whole process," says MP Singh, a professor of law at Benaras Hindu University. "The election would lack genuine issues and symbolic things like caste, community and religion would overshadow everything."

That's already happening. Marginalized in the state and devoid of any mass leader, the BJP this week launched its election campaign from Ayodhya. Though the party did not mention Ram Mandir as its main issue, the focus this time is on 'Ram Rajya' . "The people of this state want freedom from Ravan Rajya," said BJP's Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi at the Ayodhya rally. 'Ram Rajya' could be a blend of development and religion, but even its supporters have doubts about its mass appeal. "We have given up our core agenda of Hindutva and are now trying this kind of gimmick. It won't work.

Even Advaniji, who made the Ayodhya movement a national movement, was not present there," says a BJP leader from Faizabad who wants the party to return to hard Hindutva. "This is the BJP's last chance before the 2014 elections. If we don't win UP, we don't win India."

Three faultlines - caste, class and communal - threaten India. In 2012, all the three will be tested in UP. This election will deeply influence the future of dalit assertion, nature of OBC politics, Hindutva's relevance, Congress's all-India appeal and the course of development in this country.

In 2012, the people of UP will not just be voting for who forms the next government in Lucknow, they will also be voting for the idea of India.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com