Its population is bigger than Brazil's. The way its people vote can decide the direction taken by world's largest democracy. No state in India is more important in the country's forthcoming general election than Uttar Pradesh, the underdeveloped northern state of 200m people.
Of the 814m eligible voters mentioned by the Election Commission when it announced the April and May polling dates this week, 134m are in Uttar Pradesh.
"To get to the centre the final checkpost is UP," says Amit Tulsian, a partner at KPMG. "You have to do well in UP to be a decisive electoral party in the centre and that hasn't happened in the last 20 years."
The state is at the heart of India's political battles. Last weekend, Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) addressed a rally in Lucknow, the state capital, while Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party spoke in the nearby industrial city of Kanpur. They are the two most prominent politicians in India today.
UP commands 80 of the 543 elected parliamentary seats in India's Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, making this a crucial battleground. This year, as the BJP storms ahead in opinion polls, UP is more important than ever.
"For the BJP, I think the importance goes beyond the simple arithmetic," says Anjalika Bardalai, south Asia specialist at Eurasia Group. "The party needs seats in the north to make up for the fact that it may not get so many seats in the south and east."
The Hindu nationalist BJP is currently set to secure between 170 and 180 seats in all, according to Sanjeev Prasad, head of research at Mumbai-based brokerage Kotak Institutional Equities. But the party needs some 200 to 210 seats if a Modi-led government is to come to power, and even then would need the support of allies to reach the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. That means the BJP needs 40 to 50 seats in UP alone. It won just 10 in the last election in 2009.
Modi and the party know what they need to do. The BJP rally on Sunday was an impressive organisational feat. Meals were provided for some 200,000 people, there were 3,000 policemen keeping order, and 29 trains and 5,200 buses were hired to bring supporters to the rally.
Modi's speech was rousing, if composed of a string of clichs. "Today it's a saffron wave - tomorrow it will be a saffron tsunami," he roared, referring to the BJP's party colour.
He rejected recent criticism from Mulayam Singh Yadav - a political strongman in the region from the Samajwadi Party (SP) whose son is UP chief minister - about the 2002 riots in Gujarat in which hundreds of Muslims were killed soon after Modi became Gujarat's chief minister.
And he also reminded the audience of the economic prosperity in Gujarat. "I want to ask the people of UP, do you get electricity? In your villages, cities, houses?" he asked. "Go to Gujarat and see - 24 hours a day, seven days a week you get electricity."
In the largely rural state of UP, caste and religion still sway voters. And since the 1990s the UP vote has become fragmented - to the detriment of the incumbent Congress party - with the rise of regional parties such as Yadav's.
A big question mark surrounds the Muslim community, which makes up nearly 20 per cent of the population. The handling of last year's communal riots in Muzaffarnagar in UP, in which 48 people were killed and thousands of Muslims fled their homes, could put the SP on the back foot. If Muslims in UP vote as a bloc, then the BJP is unlikely to succeed, but if the vote is split between various secular and regional parties, then the Hindu nationalist opposition stands a chance.
"Caste-based politics is notoriously fractious and I think there's a sense in which the BJP could benefit from being outside this," Bardalai adds.
As UP isn't a straight Congress versus BJP contest, it could be a four- or five- cornered fight where even a small swing in votes could change the results dramatically.
Onlookers say Modi could run from a Gujarat constituency to show his loyalty to the state he has led for over a decade. Alternatively, he could confirm his pan-India appeal by running from UP, a state where the BJP must do all it can to win votes and where former BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, represented the state capital.
"Traditionally, the symbolic value is that many prime ministers of India have come from UP," explains Amitabh Dubey, director at Trusted Sources, the emerging market researcher. "Because it's the largest state it's a heavy hitter and that carries some weight."
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