Politics of colour thrives in Hindi belt

Uttar Pradesh’s chief ministers  are known to go into an overdrive to promote their party flags’ colours. BSP’s Mayawati painted Lucknow blue, SP’s Akhilesh Yadav replaced it with a dash of green and red and now it’s Yogi’s turn to go saffron.

Lucknow: As soon as you alight from a train or an aircraft in Lucknow, the first signage that greets you, says, “Muskuraiye ki aap Lucknow mein hain.”

The colour of this signage will also inform you about the party that is in power in Uttar Pradesh.

Lucknow is, perhaps, the only state capital in the country where the politics of colour dominates the development projects of the city.

The politics of colour was initially started by the Bahujan Samaj Party in 2007 when the party came to power with a comfortable majority on its own and blue become the dominant colour of official signages.

Prof Ramesh Dixit, a retired professor in political sciences, explained the competition among parties to popularise their  preferred party colour.

“The parties that pursue politics of colour want their voters to identify with colours. This makes it easy for them to campaign with T-shirts and gamchas in the colours of their parties,” he said.

“The bureaucracy has played a major role in fuelling this colour politics. They are the ones who go into an overdrive to please their political bosses. They use this to justify the huge amounts of money spent in replacing signages and re-painting railings and gates,” he said.

The red-green colours of the SP party flag.

For Ms Mayawati, the brain behind colour branding in politics, her election as chief minister was a time to go blue — the party’s official and flag colour — with a vengeance.

All road railings and signage were painted blue, traffic constables also got a change of uniform — white shirt and blue pants in place of an all white dress. Incidentally, the colour of traffic cops’ has remained so since then.

Under Mayawati’s rule, the official phone directory also came with a blue cover and government hoardings had a blue background. The stages for all programmes attended by the then chief minister, were draped in blue.

The BSP rallies were known for men painting their bodies in blue and carrying blue elephant replicas.

When the Samajwadi Party came to power in 2012, the first decision taken by its chief minister Akhilesh Yadav was to change the colour of official signages to green. The blue colour flew off the railings and road dividers and an emphatic green replaced it. Stages for official events had bold red and green backdrop, and the official phone directory turned green.

Public transport buses which have got a saffron coat of paint under the BJP government led by Yogi Adityanath.

When the BJP came to power last year, chief minister Yogi Adityanath shunned the rival parties’ colours  and started the saffron revolution.

Spotting the chief minister’s penchant for all things saffron, the state bureaucracy went into an overdrive and got saffron curtains, saffron towels, saffron diaries, saffron hoardings and saffron flowers for government programmes and offices.

State minister Siddhartha Nath Singh defended the saffron wave and said, “Saffron is a colour that denotes positivity. The rising sun is saffron in colour. What is the problem if we want to bring positivity into the government?”