‘The Rise of the Cow Belt’

Page 94-96

It is relevant that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have consistently been privileged, that their chronic failure to develop is concealed under a carapace of opacity, hiding important aspects of State development in order to enhance the weightage it would receive under the Finance Commission. The Union government has deliberately manipulated and diluted the data for this purpose. To take one example, there is the matter of literacy rates. In Uttar Pradesh, the literacy rate appears to have increased substantially from 1951 to 2011, from around 12 per cent to 68 per cent. However, one must be wary of such figures, as the definition India employs to define a literate person is an outlier. To be considered literate in India, one only has to be able to read and write their own name; this requires a very limited notion of the alphabet. If your name is Shiv, for example, you only need to know four letters. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released in January 2024 shows that more than 50 per cent of fourteen-to eighteen-year-old children in rural India are unable to solve a simple three-digit division problem that is taught in class III. Literacy skills are not much better, as from the same sample over 25 per cent were unable to read class II level textbooks and just shy of 50 per cent could not read sentences in English. Of those who could read, 26.5 per cent did not understand what they were reading. These are very damning statistics and point to population growth being an impending disaster rather than the much-vaunted demographic dividend envisaged by economists and politicians.

In this context, the priorities of State governments, and particularly that of Uttar Pradesh, are relevant.

In 2022, a new session commenced in Uttar Pradesh, but school children had no books as the government alleged it had insufficient funds to float a tender. School teachers complained that in the absence of new books, they had to collect books distributed to children in the previous school session.

However, the Uttar Pradesh government seems to have ample funds for spending on religious affairs. The Department of Religious Affairs had forwarded a budget of 1,100 crores for FY 2022–23. This is to be contrasted with the more parsimonious allocations of previous years — a paltry 32.5 crores was spent in 2017-18, which rose to 604.88 crores in 2021–22.

These priorities have to be seen in light of the vainglorious narrative that the Union government seeks to project regarding the incipient digital and knowledge economy. This seems rather fanciful given the absence of any desire to impart basic skills of literacy and numeracy; post-COVID, some 51,000 government schools have shut down without there being any express intention of replacing them. There is much excitement about digital learning, but this disregards the fact that only around 50 per cent of Indian households have access to the internet, and that figure is only 37 per cent in rural India. So, it is evident that education is not a priority and whatever resources the Uttar Pradesh government has are directed towards promoting greater religiosity, a fact that portends the future of the cow belt. With the grandiose consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, the theme of religious tourism is being projected as the ‘desideratum’ for Uttar Pradesh in terms of business and employment generation, but it is something that even the electorate of Faizabad roundly rejected in 2024.

This is the preparatory ground for the emergence of a significant politician from the cow belt, a national leader who would lead post the present Prime Minister, someone like Yogi Adityanath who has shown great fidelity to the principles of Hindutva. Post the 2024 general elections and, with rumours of there having been a falling out between Yogi and the Centre, this trajectory does not seem as self-evident as it once was, and much will hinge on the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2027.

With the emergence of the cow belt as the cynosure for the new nationalism, and with the prospect of delimitation looming, one discerns a new and unsettling diffidence amongst public intellectuals as well as politicians from the South, on the inviolability of the formula of ‘One Man, One Vote’, the signature tune of majoritarianism. In fact, what Gopalkrishna Gandhi has urged is postponing delimitation until the cow belt’s population growth comes under control (which may never happen). Clever contrivances suggested by him, such as the ‘Cambridge Compromise’, look suspiciously like the concerns Ivor Jennings, the constitutional lawyer, had alluded to in the 1950s, that in a post-colonial society, ‘a narrow franchise, indirect elections, tribal representations may all be [seen as] quite sensible.’

(Excerpted with permission from Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India by Javed Gaya, published by Context- Westland Books)

Published - July 31, 2026 08:30 am IST