UP by-elections too important for Yogi Adityanath and Akhilesh Yadav

The political observers are explaining Congress’ decision not to field any candidate in this election in two different ways.

The coming by-elections to nine assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh have thrown up interesting political equations which may have their fall outs in national level politics. If the BJP can win a handsome majority of them, at least six seats to say the least, then Yogi Adityanath’s position will be strengthened again vis-a-vis the BJP’s national level leadership structure.

Similarly if the Samajwadi Party(SP), which is contesting all the nine seats on behalf of the INDIA bloc, can score impressive results then Akhilesh Yadav will automatically be regarded as the number two in the conglomeration to which his party belongs now.

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But for Yogi Adityanath the challenge is bigger. In the last Lok Sabha election BJP’s tally in Uttar Pradesh was far away from expectation. It won 33 seats while the SP won 37 and its ally the Congress won six seats.. So the INDIA bloc’s tally reached 43 which was sufficient to give the BJP a jolt.

There were two principal reasons behind the BJP’s unsatisfactory performance. First a gulf had appeared between the RSS and the BJP over the latter’s programmes and policies. As in some other states, in UP also large numbers of RSS cadres had become inactive. Secondly caste equations went against the BJP. While the OBC and Dalit voters had sided with the saffron party en masse in the 2022 assembly poll of the state and in the 2019 parliamentary election, the same did not take place in the 2024 parliamentary poll and Akhilesh Yadav could successfully wean away this segment of voters.

Results of the last parliamentary election had made Yogi Adityanath’s position untenable within the BJP. Till now he has not been able to get over criticism within his own party. So the bye elections are important for him and with this end in view he has already met Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Sarsanghchalak, several times. In all likelihood the RSS is going to extend full support to the UP chief minister.

In such a scenario political observers are explaining Congress’ decision not to field any candidate in this election in two different ways. The UP Congress had wanted to contest four seats and messages were sent to Rahul Gandhi for his green signal. But no such signal came from Rahul. Moreover without waiting for Congress’ reaction Akhilesh had unilaterally announced candidates for six seats at the first instance. The UP Congress has accepted the snub but has expressed that it would extend all cooperation to the SP.

One group of observers think that this is a ploy by the Congress as the grand old party thinks that without its cooperation SP will not be able to do well in the poll and that would reduce Akhilesh’s bargaining power during the 2027 assembly election. But will the Congress really keep a distance from the SP’s electioneering activities? Informed circles say it may adopt this line in spite of the Congress’ official reaction that it would extend all help to the SP. Another group of opinion is that Congress has learnt a lesson from Haryana assembly results and so has agreed to accept the SP’s big brother role in UP, a state where Congress is now a lesser if not a minor power.

By Amitava Mukherjee

(The author is a senior journalist and commentator)