Opinion: ‘UP’ping the game plans

BJP is not sure whether religion as a card will be able to deliver the State for it

By Amitava Mukherjee

Yogi Adityanath, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, is a much talked about person. His saffron robes may sometimes convey a confusing impression. Saffron is also the chosen colour of the Ramakrishna Mission whose principal credo is religious toleration.

But Adityanath follows a different path. He prefers religious segregation. This has perhaps made him to declare that the coming Uttar Pradesh Assembly election will be a contest between 80 and 20. What does he really mean? The Chief Minister chose not to make it explicit. But the people of India can have their own guess. The population of Uttar Pradesh is composed of 80% Hindus and 20% Muslims. Adityanath has said that the opposition parties are now trying to get those 20% votes.

Message from RSS

This election is as important for the BJP as it is for the opposition. Adityanath does not come from the RSS background. Still, he was enthroned on the Chief Minister’s chair by the RSS itself in 2017 bypassing the wishes of Narendra Modi whose favourite was Manoj Sinha, a former union Minister and MP from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps, the RSS was trying to convey a message. Was it the first step to groom Adityanath for the post of future Prime Minister of India? Now political grapevine has it that if the BJP wins this year’s Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, then Adityanath will be seriously taken as a probable successor of Narendra Modi.

But every tool has its limitation. There are indications that the BJP is also not sure whether religion as a card will be able to deliver. Recent agitations over railway recruitments are cases in point. Moreover, in the recent past, there were defections of quite a few non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBC) leaders from the BJP. This is significant because, before the 2017 Assembly election of the State, the BJP had thrown into the air the idea of Mahahindutva, which in effect means bringing together under one umbrella all the numerically small backward caste groups and the Muslims along with Brahmins, Rajputs and Vaishyas. The idea clicked and the BJP tasted massive victory.

Successful Experiment

This year’s election will be exceptional in another sense too. Both Akhilesh Yadav, leader of the Samajwadi Party (SP), and Mayawati, his counterpart in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), had stitched up an alliance to fight the 2019 Lok Sabha election as their combined vote percentage in the 2017 Assembly election was 44%, way ahead of the BJP’s 40%. But the result was surprising as the BJP bagged 62 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh out of 80. The combined vote percentage of the SP and the BSP came down to around 37%. It proved one dictum. Uttar Pradesh is a fertile soil for social engineering and the BJP had done its homework for a successful experiment.

The upper castes are going to play a very crucial role in this year’s election. For long years after independence, they generally remained with the Congress. Since the onset of the Mandal politics, their political clout in the State waned to a great extent, which ultimately saw them climbing on to the Mayawati bandwagon in 2007. The Yadavs, core base of the SP, the Jatavs, core constituency of the BSP, and the Muslims constitute around 40% of Uttar Pradesh’s population. If the upper castes are added to this conglomeration, then the bloc becomes formidable. By bringing about this combination Mayawati had pulled off a magnificent victory for the BSP in 2007.

This time perhaps ground for the BJP will not be as smooth as it was previously. Even in 2017, when the party won a thumping majority, the rating for Adityanath was quite low and it was the charisma of Narendra Modi that had saved the day for the BJP. There is not much reason to believe that Adityanath has been able to reach such a performance graph, which will neutralise caste equations. A very important factor which the BJP must take note of is that Adityanath comes from the Thakur community, a higher caste population group of the State with feudal background, which has antagonistic relations with the lower and middle-level castes historically.

Bumpy BJP Ride

Akhilesh Yadav’s game plan will largely depend on how the non-Yadav OBC and non Jatav Dalits vote in this election. Without their support, he cannot defeat the BJP because together with the upper castes, these two groups comprise 55-60% of the State’s population. Here, Mayawati may play a crucial factor in deciding the fate of the election. She has control over the Jatavs and enjoys some marginal influences over some other sections of Dalits and Muslims. Surprisingly, Mayawati is lying low this time and she has been targeting Akhilesh Yadav mostly. She has her own reasons for this and it is not difficult to guess those reasons.

But the BJP has something to worry about from the non-Yadav OBC community. In the recent past, there were some defections of OBC leaders, including some ministers from the BJP, and all of them were from the non-Yadav communities. It is obvious that they have their own calculations about the Thakur Yogi Adityanath-led government.

In the 2019 parliamentary election, the BJP received overwhelming support from almost all sections of people except Muslims, Jatavs and Yadavs. This time it cannot be said with certainty that it will get support from all sections of non-Yadav OBC communities. If that really happens, then it can be said with certainty that the Uttar Pradesh election will be a cliffhanger.

(The author is a senior journalist and commentator)