BHUTAN-Uneasy Relationship

Janus or Trimurti?
R P MulIick EVER since the installation of Janata ministry, Uttar Pradesh has not bad any Respite from challenges to stability. The first Janata chief minister, Ram Naresh Yadav, could maintain himself precariously on the strength of caste- appeal and a policy of reservation of jobs for the 'backward' castes. Indeed, the terms 'weak' and 'retarded' as applied to sections of society have become worse than cliches, utterly bankrupt of meaning, a mere verbal device of the politicians to make opportunism look respectable, Uttar Pradesh is the premier state of India, not merely because it is the most populous but also because it has the strongest political tradition going back to pre-independence times. Here is the historic Chauri-Chaurah, epic centre of a kisan satyagraha that had such potentiality of getting transformed into a peasants' insurrection in the early twenties but for the fact of its being aborted by Gandhi, The state has not only given birth to the mainstream of Congress/Socialist ideology but to most of the semi-, crypto-, and pseudo-socialist groupings that have successively inspired and beguiled the intelligentsia. While Acharya Narendra Deva held discourses on Fabian socialism under trappings of Marxist phraseology, interpid revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, and of the Kakori, Mecrut and Cawnpore conspiracy cases carried on armed liberation struggles. Not surprisingly, Uttar Pradesh has also seen the decay of socialist ideology and its vulgarisation, as well as beautification under various labels, such as 'Congress Socialist', Traja Socialist', 'Samyukt Socialist' and 'Indian Socialist'. Narain Dutt Tewari, now leader of Congress(l) unit in the state legislature, once belonged to the PSP. Genda Singh, father figure of UF's 'ginger socialists', and Lai Bahadur Shastri had, for sometime, come under the spell of Acharya Narendra Deva's concept of highly spiritualised and 'unifying' socialism. And, trade unionism too would .suit well such socialists and progressives who flit between socialist, communist and Congress camps with remarkable felicity.