IF IT were a country, Uttar Pradesh (UP) would rank just ahead of Brazil in population, right next to Britain in land area and close to Lesotho in poverty. Measured by the complexity of its politics, though, India’s most populous state is second to none. With a plethora of faiths, castes and political allegiances, spiced up by garish nepotism, rank criminality and a first-past-the-post voting system prone to wild swings, elections in UP are always raucous and notoriously tricky to predict.
Yet they are important. The state’s 140m voters directly elect a sixth of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament; those MPs include Narendra Modi, the prime minister, as well as Rahul Gandhi, a high-up in India’s main opposition party, Congress. The legislature that sits in the state capital, Lucknow, also appoints a substantial share of members in India’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha.
The landslide capture of 73 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats is what clinched a sweeping majority for Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 general election. But the opposition’s lingering hold on the state assembly, dating from local...Continue reading
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