Chink in BJP’s armour, yet Oppn disunited in UP
The Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, due in February 2022, will be the closest to a curtain-raiser we will get for the national battle of 2024. At a time when the last round of Assembly elections has shown that regional forces do hold sway in their bases, it is important for the BJP to win the heart of what is called the heartland, extending from the Hindi belt to western India, from where the party wins most of its Lok Sabha seats.
Of immediate concern is the pall of gloom and despair that hangs over Uttar Pradesh, where Covid had spread to the countryside and bodies floating down the Ganges or buried on the banks without last rites epitomise the terrible times. The Yogi Adityanath regime rules not through political dialogue, but through the police and the bureaucracy, and even ruling party politicians are not heard. BJP MLA Rajkumar Aggarwal failed to get an FIR registered against a private hospital, a month after his son died of Covid there. In his May 8 letter, Minister of State (Labour and Employment) Santosh Gangwar, eight-term MP from Bareilly, complained to the CM about Covid mismanagement and said officers were not answering calls.
The BJP and RSS are worried. Yet there is a belief that once the second wave of Covid has passed, Yogi Adityanath would still have time to pitch the elections on a familiar ground — Hindutva. The BJP believes they would have the manpower and IT cells in each of the state’s 403 Assembly seats to steer the debate back to Ram Mandir, love jihad, Muslims and the stock themes in the larger argument that the BJP alone must reign in the ‘Hindu First’ era.
The challenge would be to make the election about health, hunger and joblessness, but what exactly is the Opposition in UP now? In the recent panchayat elections, the Samajwadi Party sprung a surprise by doing better than the BJP, thereby creating a buzz about the Assembly polls actually being a fight. Yet, if we examine data from the last few elections in the state, there is a long distance for any Opposition to travel. In the 2017 Assembly polls, the BJP’s vote share touched 40% and that of the SP and BSP was around 22% each (they fought separately). For the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the two parties formed an alliance that got around 37% of the votes while the BJP touched a dizzying 49.6%.
It was upside down, strategists believe, as the grand alliance model would work better in the Assembly polls. Now, from all public posturing, it is not to be. Ties between the SP and BSP have soured and over the past year, at the district level, many BSP workers have shifted to the SP. Besides, there has always been speculation that the BJP has tied the hands of BSP chief Mayawati with the threat of corruption cases (she would not want to end up like former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad Yadav) besides holding out a possibility of a presidential position, should she act in ways that benefit the national party. Mayawati herself has said that she would rather give up politics than tie up with the BJP, but she has tied up with them in the past. She may never win a majority on her own, but in state polls, can be assured of some seats where voters of the dominant Dalit sub-caste, the Jatavs/Chamars create a solid bloc.
The BJP has in recent polls been able to get support from a section of non-Jatav Dalits, besides most of the upper castes and non-Yadav OBCs. That is a formidable social base on paper but the April panchayat polls did signal erosion. Traditionally, the SP has Yadav and Muslim support, so it would have to build a larger social base and become a symbol of anti-incumbency to win against what will surely be better funded BJP election machinery. What Akhilesh Yadav has going for him is the perception that the SP would be giving the main fight to the BJP. They also have an alliance with the RLD led by Jayant Chaudhary that has support among the Jats of western UP.
There is speculation over whether the Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad would consider a loose arrangement with the emerging Opposition. The Bhim Army did posit a decent performance in the panchayat polls in Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur and claims to have won seats in central and east UP as well. They say they are gearing up for the Assembly polls and it would be interesting to see if UP has space for another Dalit-led party.
The Congress is actually the party that at an individual level produced volunteers helping Covid-hit families in cities with oxygen supply, but they have no real structure on the ground in UP. They would possibly perform in the manner in which they recently did in Bengal, fight in a few old bastions and get anything from zero to single digits. In the last state polls, Akhilesh Yadav had tied up with the Congress but is unlikely to do so again, especially after the Congress under-performed as part of an alliance with the RJD in state polls in neighbouring Bihar last year.
The only logic to even start a conversation with the Congress could be an attempt to win over the Brahmins. Uttar Pradesh is a state with the peculiarity of having upper castes make up 20 per cent of the population and half of them are Brahmins. Varanasi, the PM’s seat and a city with a huge Brahmin population, has been devastated by Covid. Pandit Chhannulal Mishra, a great singer of the Benares gharana of Hindustani classical music, lost both his wife and a daughter to Covid (he was the proposer of Narendra Modi’s name for the seat in 2014). Pandit Rajan Mishra of the famous Rajan-Sajan duo of the Benares gharana also died due to Covid in a Delhi hospital. There is great unrest, sorrow and an almost philosophic gloom among the residents of Kashi.
Uttar Pradesh is home to the largest number of Brahmins in India and besides numbers, those at the top of the caste scale, create atmospherics. Currently, some are speaking of a Kalyug (age of darkness, misery, quarrel and hypocrisy). Even if a small number shifts from the BJP, it can change the chemistry. It’s early days, but some hazy outlines are emerging.
