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Will Prayagraj opt for greater confluence in UP elections?
UP election: No surprises that the colloquially expressed angst has resonance across the district, where the BJP–led alliance won nine of the twelve seats in the previous poll. Repeating the record might be an uphill climb. Prayagraj goes to the polls on February 27.
Allahabad is now Prayagraj. But Prayagraj isn’t the Allahabad that had a political swagger of its own; its gait a gift of history dressed up by a shining intellectual tradition. The city’s lore was at once a tale of leaders known for their national heft, not to talk of writers-poet laureates who influenced generations before and after India broke free of the British yoke.
The city isn’t just famous for the confluence of three sacred rivers called the Sangam, the Kumbh or the Anand Bhawan, the ancestral home of the Nehrus which is now a museum. For countless others, it was an education-hub par excellence, the beacon light of which was Allahabad University (AU).
Those who walked the university’s portals or made the city their home were the crème de la crème of scholarship and stewardship. Known for their seminal work in Urdu and Hindi, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Harivansh Rai Bachchan taught English in AU. The latter’s matinee idol son, Amitabh Bachchan was a Congress MP from Allahabad which also was home to such legendary litterateurs as Mahavedi Verma, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala and Dhramvir Bharti. Munshi Prem Chand was from Banaras but was an AU student.
A banner outside a bungalow in Tagore Town proclaims its ancestry to Nirala. Among the poet’s famous lines are those he penned on the struggles of a woman stone-breaker: “wah todti patthar, dekha maine usey Ilahabad ke path par...”
The vagaries of time have blurred, not obliterated the city’s past. On display inside the entrance to the main AU campus is a marble bust in the foreground of the Allahabad University Students’ Union (AUSU) office. It’s a memorial to Lal Padmdhar Singh, who fell to the bullets of the British police while leading a students’ march during the 1942 Quit India Movement.
His martyrdom motivated generations down the line, recalls Abhay Awasthi, a former AUSU office bearer. For decades, aspiring and elected union members would take a pledge in Padmdhar’s name to defend the university’s ‘glorious’ traditions. Counted among them is an impressive assembly of leaders: VP Singh, Chadrashekhar, ND Tiwari, H N Bahuguna, Arjun Singh, Madan Lal Khurana, Janeshwar Mishra and Mohan Singh. The BJP’s Murli Manohar Joshi was a student and a teacher at AU besides being a three-time MP from Allahabad.
AU those days was a crucible of ideas with space for differing ideologies: the centrist Congress, the socialists, the centre-right, the left and the far-left. The founder of the Banaras Hindu University, Madan Mohan Malviya was a student, so were former President Shankar Dayal Sharma, Nepal’s BP Koirala and educationist Nurul Hasan. They did not study in Allahabad University, but Pandit Nehru and Netaji Subhash Bose were honorary members of its students’ union.
That eclectic political breadth has since shrunk, the Mandal-Mandir face-off of the late 80s and early 90s making politics a reductive slugfest between caste and faith-based identities. A casualty of it was AUSU, said K K Roy, the union’s former president then representing a far-Left student organisation.
From being the cerebral hub that it was of educated, argumentative learners, AUSU’s politics became violently combative in the changed political milieu. The retrogressive shift marginalised the established centrist, centre-left ideologies. One reason why the far-right gained ascendance was the progressive forces’ failure to adapt to the tectonic socio-political shift.
In the aftermath of these churns and challenges, AUSU lost its trade-mark lustre. Its sole living avatar in the ongoing polls is one of its former presidents, Anugrah Narain Singh.
Having led the Union in the post-Emergency 1979 phase, the four-time MLA contesting his tenth assembly election is perhaps the Congress’s only hope in Prayagraj that sends 12 legislators to the state assembly. If he wins, as he has in the past, he’d be representing Allahabad city (North) encompassing the university campus besides the Anand Bhawan.
At 71, the slightly built leader, popularly known as Anugrah bhaiya, carries his years lightly. Without any police gunner or other trappings of power, he campaigns in a sleeveless puffer jacket and a golf cap, telling people that the impending polls are his swan song.
That has generated sympathy of sorts for the easily accessible Congressman whose main rival is the sitting BJP legislator Harshvardhan Bajpai. The latter is the son of Ashok Bajpai, a contemporary of Singh who’s the son of former central minister Rajendari Kumari Bajpai.
The incumbent MLA has the advantage of the BJP’s organisational muscle but is facing strong anti-incumbency. With the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in the fray, Singh’s reliance on his past work and personal appeal is hard to miss. “I’ve always been an Opposition MLA,” he chuckles at his public meetings. “If elected, I won’t sell your mandate to money bags...”
A pointer to his connect with educated middle-classes came from Neelam Kant who was an AU student when Singh was elected president. “His mashaal (torch)-procession was the largest and most disciplined, the marchers respectfully making way for girl students on the campus...I’d vote for him to relive the university’s bygone glory.”
In the other two city seats, the AU’s motto---as many branches, so many trees--- isn’t much in discussion. That’s despite the fact that in Allahabad (west) a good fight is happening between state minister Siddharth Nath Singh and another former student leader, the SP’s Richa Singh. She was elected the second woman president in the AUSU’s 99-year history in 2015.
From a free-wheeling chat at a tea shop on a busy city square, it was evident that the paucity of jobs, dipping incomes and inflation could break open the backward caste compact on which the BJP rode to power in 2017. A telling one-liner on the ruling party’s comeuppance came from one of its own: mehngai aur berozgari ka matlab kodh me khaaj (Inflation and unemployment are like a leper’s itch).
No surprises that the colloquially expressed angst has resonance across the district, where the BJP–led alliance won nine of the twelve seats in the previous poll. Repeating the record might be an uphill climb. Prayagraj goes to the polls on February 27.
