Advantage Adityanath

THE RECENT BYPOLLS in seven of the 403 seats in the Uttar Pradesh state Assembly would not have attracted much national attention had it not been for the way they were fought. Although they covered only a fraction of the electorate of the most populous Indian state, the elections were projected by a section of pundits and pitched by the enthusiastic yet disparate opposition—the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress—as a test for Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s brand of governance and an opportunity for each party to establish itself as a key challenger to the incumbent in the 2022 Assembly polls. While the outcome was expected by some of these parties, which had railed against the Chief Minister in a no-holds-barred campaign, to be a morale booster for their cadre, it turned out that the BJP had the last laugh, winning six of the seven constituencies and retaining its poll glory of 2017 and 2019. In his moment of triumph, Adityanath called the results a confirmation of the “common man’s faith”.

The scene looked distant from the April of 2019 when the SP and the BSP had joined hands in a major realignment of forces in the state. Standing on a dais, flanked by SP leader Akhilesh Yadav and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Ajit Singh, BSP leader Mayawati had asked the people not to let their votes get split between the Congress and the Grand Alliance of SP and BSP in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress, she had told her audience comprising a large section of Muslims, was not strong enough to stop the BJP. It was in Deoband, where the Darul Uloom, Asia’s largest Islamic seminary, is located, that the SP-BSP-RLD alliance decided to begin its campaign for the Lok Sabha elections.

Nearly a fortnight before that rally, Adityanath, who had become chief minister in the 2017 state election, had kicked off his campaign near the Shakumbhari Devi temple, just 40 km away, in the same district of Saharanpur. Back then it looked like the BJP had locked horns with an alliance that had got its caste math right. This game of numbers, however, failed to click despite the old arch-rivals hoping to consolidate the Jatav, Yadav and Muslim votes. The BJP swept the state, winning 62 of the 80 seats with nearly half the vote share. Last year’s results showed how the Grand Alliance fell like a house of cards.

This time round, the BSP and the SP were back on the warpath to ride the wave of anti-incumbency they had expected against the ruling government. Their hopes seemed high despite both ruling out an alliance with each other or with the Congress. The SP had aligned with the Congress in the 2017 Assembly elections only to face a humiliating defeat. With the results showing them their respective slots in state politics ahead of the next election in the state, around 14 months from now, what we have in the most electorally significant state is a shrunken opposition cocking a snook at one another in their fight for the anti-BJP vote.

By the next state elections, Mayawati would be a decade out of power in Uttar Pradesh. Over the last two years, she has vacillated between strategies. First, she amiably joined hands with the SP and then bitterly parted ways. She deviated from her resolve of skipping the bypolls this time. Though the BSP lost all the seven bypolls earlier this month, it secured a 19 per cent vote share thanks to the caste loyalty of the Jatavs. But trouble seems to be brewing for her. At 64, apparently weary of running the show all by herself, she has brought members of her family into party posts, going against her own earlier promises not to turn the party into a dynastic entity.

It was at the Saharanpur rally last year that she had introduced her nephew Akash Anand, the eldest of the three sons of her brother Anand Kumar, to the public, sending the message that he would be her political heir. Mayawati was herself 45 when Kanshi Ram, who belonged to the Sikh Chamar community among the Dalits, which has 66 sub-castes, gave her the reins of the party he had founded in 1984. The BSP fought its first Assembly elections in a tie-up with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP in 1993, a year after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Kanshi Ram brought the Dalits, particularly Chamars, under one umbrella, giving them a separate political identity—and dignity—among the Hindus. The parting with the SP in 1995 following the infamous guesthouse episode—in which Mayawati risked being killed by SP men—was the beginning of a long rivalry that they buried briefly during the Lok Sabha polls in 2019 hoping to stop the Modi juggernaut.

This year, the BSP was hoping to cash in on the state police’s handling of the Hathras case involving the death of a 20-year-old Dalit woman. Mayawati may have been condemning it but her absence from Hathras triggered protests in the community, alleging she no longer believed in justice for Dalits. Notably, Mayawati made her entry into politics by projecting herself as ‘Dalit ki beti (daughter of a Dalit)’ and reaching out to the Jatavs who comprise close to half of the 22 per cent Dalits in UP. They have remained her trusted supporters although her party’s vote share has been declining since 2007.

Soon after her party’s bypoll debacle and the Bihar victory of the BJP-led NDA against the Mahagathbandhan, Mayawati lost no time in devising her strategy for 2022— focusing on the ‘Most Backward’ among the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), large sections of whom have shifted allegiance to the BJP. She has appointed Bhim Rajbhar of Mau in eastern UP as the party’s state chief, replacing former Rajya Sabha member Munquad Ali, the only Muslim holding a key party post. The Muslim vote in the state generally gets divided between the SP, which draws the larger chunk of it, and the Congress.

So fierce is her hostility towards the SP that she has even sent signals of getting cosy with the BJP in the recent Rajya Sabha polls. The BJP was once the BSP’s former ally at a time when the SP’s militant secularism was at its peak under Mulayam Singh Yadav. Thanks to her outreach, the BJP refrained from putting up a candidate against Ramji Lal Gautam, a Rajya Sabha candidate of the BSP. Her party has just 10 seats in Lok Sabha and five in Rajya Sabha. Mayawati, to get back at Akhilesh Yadav for trying to wean away seven members of her party in the cut-throat world of UP’s regional wranglings, had said she could vote with the BJP to keep the SP out. This is not the first time that Mayawati, who is embroiled in disproportionate assets cases, has warmed up to the BJP. In July, when the Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan was faced with a crisis following a revolt within the Congress, she issued a whip asking the six MLAs, who had won on a BSP ticket, to vote against it.

POLITICAL PUNDITS ANTICIPATE a tug-of-war among opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh for the 10-12 per cent Brahmin vote. But then the recent bypolls have reinforced the BJP’s confidence that the Brahmin voter is not disillusioned with the party. “We won seats which are Brahmin-dominated in the byelections. The BJP’s governance has a constructive agenda with its ear to the ground, while the three opposition parties have none. Second, the BJP has a strong leadership in Yogi Adityanath,” says Sidharth Nath Singh, a cabinet minister in the state.

Adityanath has demonstrated his government’s firm will to crush crime by hunting down gangsters and history-sheeters, many of whom are now in jail. He has earned praise from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is an MP from the state, for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the concomitant migrant crisis in UP. Besides, the chief minister has won accolades for pursuing development. Listing out achievements on the completion of three years of his government in March, he said the Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit has brought investment proposals worth Rs 4.68 lakh crore, of which 371 projects have been implemented. These, he said, will generate more than 33 lakh direct and indirect employment opportunities. His government is planning 12 new airports, including one in Jewar, in a state where only three cities are currently connected to the air grid.

It was Mayawati who had proposed the Jewar airport in Greater Noida. She, too, built projects like the six-lane Yamuna Expressway and laid out the framework for the Ganga Expressway as chief minister from 2007 to 2012. But the building of sprawling memorials and lavish homes overshadowed her rule.

The BJP, flaunting Adityanath’s development agenda and the Ram Temple, is hoping to cut across caste lines, in an effort to further weaken the challenge from the opposition. “The BJP will get the advantage of a divided opposition. It’s pure simple mathematics. The social base gets fragmented. Besides, Yogi is seen as an active chief minister and there is no significant anti-incumbency against him,” says political analyst Badri Narayan. No longer just a Brahmin party, the BJP has managed to wean away large sections of the most backward classes, as was evident in Bihar. In UP, it has brought into its fold the non-Jatav Dalits and the non-Yadav OBCs who are outside the core support base of Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav.

The SP has failed to expand beyond its Yadav voters who are increasingly veering towards the BJP. Of every six Yadavs in the state, two voted for the BJP in 2019, according to a study by the Centre for the Study of Society and Politics, Kanpur. The SP lost its three family boroughs—Kannauj, Badaun and Firozabad—which it had won in the Modi wave of 2014 to the BJP’s non-Yadav candidates. Mayawati had even accused the SP of failing to transfer its votes to her candidates during the 2019 alliance. In the last General Election, it was the SP that bore the bigger brunt, winning just five seats—13.7 per cent—while the BSP secured 10—26.3 per cent.

In the recent bypolls, the SP managed to win Malhani, but only with a margin of less than 5,000 votes, while it trailed the BJP in Tundla, Deoria and Naugawan. The only consolation for it was an increase in its vote percentage by 1.8 per cent. Akhilesh Yadav, who was missing in action, has recently tried to build bridges with his estranged uncle Shivpal Yadav and hinted at seat adjustments with the latter’s Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party. For his part, the former chief minister has ruled out any alliance with either the BSP or the Congress. “Since the past three elections, voters of UP have provided a clear and decisive mandate. In 2017, the BSP portrayed itself as the main opposition party and tacitly supported the BJP by giving 99 tickets to Muslims. But after snapping ties with the SP and taking BJP support in the Rajya Sabha elections, the confusion is cleared. Now, anti-BJP voters have only one choice—the SP,” argues SP leader Sudhir Panwar.

The BSP however insists that Mayawati is the best alternative to the BJP. “People have seen three governments—Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav and the BJP. It was Mayawati who provided the best law and order. The development index was high,” claims BSP leader Sudhindra Bhadoria. The Congress, despite the hype around its general secretary Priyanka Gandhi’s professed spell, has been a non-starter. It drew a blank in the bypolls and lost deposits in four seats, though its vote share rose by 1.2 per cent. She, too, was conspicuous by her absence during the polls, although the party’s state committee chief Ajay Lallu claims Gandhi was able to galvanise the cadres. “Our party workers are taking to the streets. Many of them have gone to jail in one year. We will fight on the basis of issues like women’s security and farmers’ woes.” According to political analyst Sajjan Kumar, the Congress, which does not have a core caste-community support base, is way down the ladder in the war of perception as far as winning ability is concerned. Gandhi, he says, may contribute to the anti-Adityanath discourse of the opposition, but he doesn’t see her party gaining from any such moves. “After all, nobody wants to waste a vote.” With the three main opposition parties—the SP, the BSP and the Congress— planning to go it alone in 2022, each hoping to be the BJP’s main contender, it is not difficult to foresee the winner. But in politics, 14 months is a long time.

About The Author

Amita Shah