UP assembly polls 2022: Mood for change in Jatland's bellwether villages

Sandeep Dikshit

Muzaffarnagar/Baghpat, February 5

The mood is for change in the four bellwether villages nestled deep into the countryside in western UP, straddling the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Baghpat. Their voting pattern tends to replicate in a swathe of at least 40 of the 58 seats in the belt that go to the polls in the first phase. At the Jat-dominated Kakripur, the era when Sanjeev Baliyan polled 97 per cent of the votes in 2014 from three of its five booths to stamp the BJP’s hold over the community has waned. In its Assembly segment of Budhana, Baliyan had trailed Ajit Singh by 15,000 votes in 2019. And this was before the farmers’ agitation. At Jaula village, where the call to revive the Jat-Muslim brotherhood went out from 86-year-old farmer leader Ghulam Mohammad Jaula in February this year, elders huddled around bonfires are even more unanimous than at Kakripur about voting for the RLD-SP alliance. The 2013 agitation had destroyed the “bhaichara” (brotherhood), sending the Jats and Muslims their separate voting ways to the delight of the BJP which won all five seats in Muzaffarnagar.

The third and the fourth bellwether villages Kishanpur Baral and Baral, however, are holding firm to their earlier choice of the BJP although there are cracks in the former which has the truly silent voter, the Dalits and the lower OBCs, who in a tight election such as this can tilt the scales.

Kishanpur Baral had in 2019 split its loyalties between the BJP and the rainbow alliance of the RLD-BSP-SP. But with the BSP in the fray, the alliance, now reduced to the RLD-SP, will have fewer votes coming their way.

Baral is the village of late Vijay Pal Singh of the CPI who upset Charan Singh in the 1972 elections. It was 48 years later that a Charan Singh scion contested again from Muzaffarnagar in 2019 only to lose again, even if the margin was wafer thin. The trend at Baral tends to be followed by other upper castes elsewhere. The mood here in the Rajput village is completely with the Bharatiya Janata Party. A passerby, hailing Yogi to condescending smiles from others, firmly establishes the impression.