BJP seems down in Uttar Pradesh, but can SP defeat it?

For BJP, a loss in UP in 2022 would weaken its strength in the Rajya Sabha and boost the morale of the opposition in the run-up to 2024 Lok Sabha polls

The rising tide of anger against the Yogi Adityanath government over its mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic in Uttar Pradesh has begun to unnerve workers and leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Assembly polls in the state, slated eight months from now, no longer seem a cakewalk.

The shift in public mood, evident in the results of the recently-held panchayat elections, has lifted the spirits in the ranks of the BJP’s principal rival in UP, the Samajwadi Party (SP). It has taken to proclaim its slogan, ‘Akhilesh dobara’ (Akhilesh Yadav once again), with gusto.

Suddenly, the situation in UP is somewhat reminiscent of the electoral crests and troughs of two decades back.

Echoes from the past

A big reason Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led BJP couldn’t return to power at the Centre in 2004 was because of its losses in UP, primarily at the hands of the SP. The BJP won a measly 10 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2004 against the SP’s 35. This helped Congress pip the BJP by a mere eight seats to emerge as the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha.

The ground had started slipping under the BJP’s feet in UP two years before that. In the Assembly polls in 2002, SP’s Mulayam Singh Yadav gnawed at BJP’s Hindu consolidation by stitching a patchwork of backward and extremely backward castes.

The BJP not only lost power but was reduced to number three in the UP Assembly. The BJP’s tally, in double digits in the 403-member Assembly, was then its worst after the post-Ram Janmabhoomi movement phase in 1990-91. The BJP seats dipped further in the subsequent 2007 and 2012 Assembly polls.

Like father, like son?

With Mayawati-led BSP showing a terminal decline, does Akhilesh Yadav possess the perspicacity to defeat the BJP’s triumvirate of Narendra Modi-Amit Shah-Yogi Adityanath just as his father defeated Vajpayee-LK Advani-Rajnath Singh’s two decades back?

The SP is unlikely to have at its command resources the BJP can commandeer. But other circumstances are suitable.

A generational shift has taken place in ally Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) with the passing away of Ajit Singh. In SP, an unwell Mulayam Singh Yadav no longer interferes in day-to-day decisions. Akhilesh and uncle Shivpal Yadav are said to have mended relations.

The RLD, under Jayant Chaudhary, is on the path to regaining the political clout it had lost in western UP after the communal riots in Muzaffarnagar in 2013. The riots laid asunder the electoral unity of Jats and Muslims that Chaudhary Charan Singh, Jayant’s grandfather, had built in the 1960s and 70s.

The anti-farm laws protests have helped heal wounds between Jats and Muslims. The RLD has claimed that candidates it supported in the panchayat polls performed better than the BJP-backed ones in Mathura.

Panchayat elections were not held on election symbols, but the SP has claimed that of the 3,500 district panchayat seats which went to the polls, it supported 1,500 candidates, of which 800 won. The SP defeated the BJP in its strongholds of Varanasi, Ayodhya, Gorakhpur and Lucknow.

In the last couple of years, Akhilesh has downplayed his party’s caste identity. He has, instead, showcased his tenure as UP’s chief minister (2012-17) as one of ‘vikas’, or development.

He has also learnt lessons from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC). In Delhi, the AAP chanted ‘Jai Bajrang Bali’ to neutralize BJP’s aggressive ‘Jai Sri Ram’, and Mamata Banerjee in Bengal recited the chandi path.

In April, Akhilesh tested positive for coronavirus after a dip in the Ganga during the Kumbh festival. Recently, he tweeted his wishes on the Parashuram Jayanti. He has also reached out to sections of Dalits. On April 14, on the occasion of the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar, he launched his party’s ‘Ambedkar vahini’, or Ambedkar brigade.

BJP's predicament

For the BJP, a loss in UP in 2022 would weaken its strength in the Rajya Sabha, force it to settle for a compromise candidate in the next year’s presidential election and boost the morale of the opposition in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

The BJP’s famous 2017 victory, where the party and its allies won 325 seats, had come on the back of rollout of social welfare schemes, like the Ujjwala, which provided free cooking gas cylinders to the poor and stoking patriotic fervour over the Uri surgical strikes.

The question that confronts the BJP is whether it can do something in the next 220 days — the model code of conduct should kick in by the first week of January — to assuage the anger in the state not least helped by news and visuals of desperate people depositing their dead in the rivers, or burying them in the riverbanks.

For the SP, the task is equally uphill. Its best vote share in UP was 29 per cent in 2012 when it won 224 seats. This dropped to 21.17 per cent in 2017. Can the SP increase its vote share to at least 35 to 37 per cent to defeat the BJP in 2022?

Not that it has not been done before. In 2017, the BJP increased its vote share by 25 per cent to 39.7 per cent to sweep the polls.