Gold of others help Uttar Pradesh glitter during Diwali
A user posted videos on X (formerly Twitter) of glittering Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore, and other northern, western, and central cities decorated for the Hindu festival Diwali with lights all over the streets, asking why southern states can’t have something similar.
While the user got trolled over his remark on the Diwali lightings, questions have been on the rise over the expenses incurred by the state governments, like that of the monk-turned-politician Yogi Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in celebrating the Hindu festival with much fanfare and organising a gala event to create an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The BJP government has been using the optics of lighting lamps in the holy city of Ayodhya, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated Lord Rama’s temple on the controversial plot where the 15th-century Babri Masjid once stood, on Diwali eve since 2017. This year, according to government data and the Guinness Book of World Records, 25,12,585 (2.5m) earthen lamps or diyas were lit on 55 banks of the river Saryu, with 1,121 ‘vedacharyas’ (Brahminical religious teachers) performing the religious rites of ‘aarti’ to make another world record, in which there is no visible competitor.
The optics of Ayodhya have been adding feathers to the hat of the Yogi government, which has significantly failed to catapult the state in the last seven years of incessant rule on human development index parameters. While millions leave Uttar Pradesh in search of a livelihood in other states of India or abroad, the government’s focus has remained on exclusive growth, saffronisation and promotion of Hindutva ideology to consolidate the BJP’s hold on power. But the question arises, at what cost?
The cost of Yogi’s Ayodhya optics
In 2017, soon after coming to power, Yogi started the practice of majestic grandeur in Ayodhya. While 171,000 lamps were lit that year, the number increased to 500,000 lamps, consuming 20,000 litres of oil, in 2019, for which the government spent Rs 13.3m. In 2023, Yogi’s government had 2.23m diyas to set a world record. And this year the number reached 2.5m.
Now, if inflation is kept aside, a five-time increase in the number of diyas between 2019 and 2024 would mean the government’s expenses have also gone up by five times. It essentially translates into a minimum of Rs 66.5m in 2024, not including inflation.
Now, Uttar Pradesh has a total road size of 442,907km, which is the second-highest in the country after Maharashtra with 636,887km of roads. However, much of Uttar Pradesh’s population doesn’t have basic road coverage if the length of the national and state highways as well as district and project roads are not considered.
The Basic Road Statistics 2018-19 shows that Uttar Pradesh has a rural road availability of 1km per 1,000 people. In the urban space, there are only 0.35km of road for every 1,000 people.
Here is the pan-India data for road availability per 1,000 population in urban and rural areas of states, sans the national and state highways, as well as district and project roads.
While the Yogi government has unapologetically spent money from the public exchequer to celebrate Diwali in Ayodhya with 2.5m diyas, it has installed 1.29m street lights under the Government of India’s Street Lighting National Programme (SLNP) launched in January 2015.
The SLNP covers rural and urban roads and not highways, and despite being the largest state with a BJP government, Uttar Pradesh lags behind Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in implementing the SLNP.
The per capita income of Uttar Pradesh, based on net state GDP on current prices, base year 2011-12, was Rs 83,565 in the financial year (FY) 2022-23. It was far lower than India’s other poor states like Odisha (Rs 149,902), West Bengal (Rs 141,373), Madhya Pradesh (Rs 140,583) or even Jharkhand (Rs 91,874).
Now questions may arise on how the Uttar Pradesh government can spend money on festivities when its per capita income is low.
The answer lies in the flawed tax distribution system of the country.
Getting paid for population
While key Hindi belt States like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh fail to generate adequate tax revenue compared to their counterparts in the south or west, they get a significant allocation from the Union due to India’s flawed tax distribution system.
While States pay the Union the share of its taxes according to actual collections, the Union pays the States according to their population, and not their human development index or performance on the economic, social or technological fronts.
According to the Union Ministry of Finance, in FY 2023-24, Karnataka, with a population of 64.10m, paid the Union a total GST of Rs 1.45 trillion, which translates to a per capita GST contribution of Rs 22,662. Similarly, Tamil Nadu, which has a population of 83.90m, paid a total GST of Rs 1.21 trillion, which translates to a per capita GST contribution of Rs 14,461.14.
The following chart shows the total GST contribution and per capita GST contributions by a few southern States, West Bengal in the east and the Hindi-belt States like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
It can be seen that the non-Hindi States have a higher GDP contribution vis-a-vis the Hindi-belt States.
However, when it comes to the distribution of the Union’s revenue with the States, the former pays more to the States that contribute less and less to those who pay more.
A state like Bihar gets nearly six times its tax contribution while Uttar Pradesh receives nearly double the amount it pays to the Union, but Karnataka gets three times less than what it contributes; the situation is similar with Tamil Nadu, Kerala or even West Bengal.
The chart shows the strange distribution of taxes by the Union.
Although the non-Hindi States have achieved higher human development index targets and managed to reduce their population growth, they are not entitled to any incentive from the Union, while States of the Hindi belt that have ignored such indexes are incentivised for their rampant population growth, not just with the money they spend on celebrations and creating optics, but also politically—by increasing the number of seats in the Parliament through delimitation based on population.
The road to Delhi
Even though the BJP has suffered a jolt in the last Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, its modern-day Hindutva-driven bigotry laboratory, it’s confident of consolidating the eroding Hindu vote bank by fear-mongering and spinning Islamophobic narratives before the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.
The BJP, and the mainstream Indian polity, strongly believe that the road to Delhi’s throne is through Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The state with 80 Lok Sabha—the lower house of the Indian Parliament—seats, sends the highest number of members of the Parliament (MPs).
In a bid to consolidate the party’s hold on Uttar Pradesh, Modi himself contests from the Varanasi constituency instead of his home state Gujarat.
The BJP will do anything to hold on to Uttar Pradesh to secure its long-term political interests, hence the grand celebrations of the Hindu festival of Diwali or spending money on tourism around the Ram temple continues unabated in the state while its working class is immigrating to war-torn occupied Palestinian territories to work as replacements of Palestinian workers for Zionist occupiers, risking their lives.
As States in the south and elsewhere have started voicing their opposition to the faulty and utmost discriminatory tax distribution system as well as the proposed delimitation of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha seats, which will render non-Hindi States irrelevant in Indian polity, there is a tinge of hope that a new political discourse can strongly emerge from these faulty lines.
Can the States at the receiving end win justice for themselves and stop funding for Yogi’s fancy projects when his state fails to uplift people from abject poverty? It’s worth seeking the answer to this question by closely following the issue.
An avid reader and a merciless political analyst. When not writing then either reading something, debating something or sipping espresso with a dash of cream. Street photographer. Tweets as @la_muckraker