As we head close to the assembly elections early next year, the political discourse in Uttar Pradesh is caught between two competing models of mobilisation. On one side is chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s emergent governance calculus, where the state’s role is defined by the delivery of security and welfare, decoupled from identity. On the other is a regression to caste arithmetic driven by Opposition leader Akhilesh Yadav, framed as ‘PDA’ (Backwards, Dalits, Minorities), driven by selective outrage and historical amnesia.
The opposition’s strategy relies heavily on highlighting law-and-order incidents through a caste-based prism. By selectively amplifying cases where victims belong to specific communities-such as the cases of Pawan Kumar Yadav in Prayagraj, Shishpal Yadav in Raebareli, or Saurabh Yadav in Varanasi-the attempt is to engineer inter-caste resentment. The objective is clear: consolidate a coalition of grievances. However, this rhetoric obfuscates the opposition’s own track record of institutional capture, where caste was not just an electoral tool, but an administrative apparatus.
Data from the previous Samajwadi Party (SP) regime reveals a systemic conflation of caste and governance. In June 2014, state home department data indicated that in key districts, nearly 60 per cent of police station in-charges belonged to a single caste. In Badayun, 72.7 per cent of station heads were Yadavs; in Kannauj, 55.5 per cent. This structural bias in policing birthed an era of selective protection. The manifestations of this breakdown ranged from the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and the Jawahar Bagh massacre to the unchecked reign of syndicates led by figures like Atiq Ahmed and Mukhtar Ansari. The suspension of IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal for acting against the sand mafia, the brutal burning of journalist Jagendra Singh for exposing corruption, and the shielding of cabinet minister Gayatri Prajapati despite serious allegations of sexual assault, underscored a model where political utility trumped the rule of law. Governance was tethered to vote banks, leaving marginalized communities outside the favoured caste radius to fend for themselves.
In stark contrast, the current Yogi government has sought to depoliticise the state machinery. The defining principle has shifted from identity-based postings to rule-based postings, and from selective protection to a uniform application of the law. The administration’s data reveals a strict zero-tolerance policy toward crime, irrespective of the perpetrator’s political affiliation or caste.
The state’s law enforcement trajectory includes decisive action against its own. An analysis of the state’s action register reveals a pattern: Kuldeep Sengar (Thakur, Unnao), Chinmayanand (Thakur, Shahjahanpur), Ashish Mishra (Brahmin, Lakhimpur Kheri), and local leaders like Shrikant Tyagi and Ashok Chandel. Across the board, the determinant for action is the nature of the crime, not the caste or the political proximity of the accused. When a ruling dispensation allows its police to act against its own MLAs, MPs, and affiliated leaders across caste lines, it signals a structural shift from partisan policing to institutional autonomy.
This ethos extends beyond law and order into the realm of welfare delivery and administrative reform. The opposition’s PDA narrative posits that caste-based segmentation of state resources is the sole metric of social justice. The current administration counters this with community-wise beneficiary data that demonstrates universal delivery. Housing, ration, and healthcare schemes are implemented based on socio-economic vulnerability rather than caste quotas. By bypassing local middlemen and digitising the welfare pipeline, the state has structurally disabled the patronage networks that previously filtered benefits through a caste lens.
However, the data suggests a maturing of the electorate’s expectations. The structural reforms in UP’s policing and the universalisation of welfare delivery have disrupted the traditional arithmetic of caste mobilisation. This shift is not merely rhetorical; it is embedded in the state’s administrative DNA. To dismantle historical nepotism in public sector recruitments, the Yogi administration introduced operational guardrails like anonymized, blind-coded grading processes, completely hiding candidate names and castes from interviewers. Interviews for Group C and D positions were eliminated altogether to root out human bias. Under the Mission Rozgar initiative, over 9.5 lakh government appointments were processed through digitized, transparent workflows. Official data reveals that over 60% of state recruitments since 2017 have been secured by OBC, SC, and ST candidates-a testament to merit over patronage.
Furthermore, the state has actively scrubbed caste indicators from governance and public spaces. It formally banned the mention of caste in police FIRs and arrest memos to eliminate investigative bias. Overt assertions of caste dominance were curbed by enforcing strict penalties against caste-based stickers on vehicles, and caste-driven political rallies were prohibited to transition discourse toward development. To ensure that benefits reach the truly marginalized rather than being monopolized by politically dominant sub-castes, the government initiated a comprehensive data-mapping exercise assessing the representation of 79 distinct OBC sub-castes across government jobs over a decade.
The battle in Uttar Pradesh is no longer just about who represents which caste, but which model of the state prevails: one that uses institutions to deepen social fissures for electoral gains, or one that uses them to deliver uniform, unfiltered governance. The current data indicates a decisive shift toward the latter, rendering the politics of selective outrage increasingly ineffective.
(The author is a senior journalist)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
