Muzaffarnagar Mahapanchayat and MAJGAR

Can the Tikaits step into the big shoes of such unifying Jat leaders as Chaudhary Charan Singh and their father, Mahendra Singh Tikait?

Indians in general, and voters in Uttar Pradesh in particular, vote their caste. And farmers coming together to vote for their sectional interests, overcoming their caste allegiances, is rare. Why should then Sunday's rally in Muzaffarnagar worry the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)?

It should be because, in the 1960s, Chaudhary Charan Singh's political genius knitted an alliance of intermediate peasant castes of western UP. If it happened then, can't it happen now?

One needs to go a few years back, to April 10, 2014, to understand the subtext of Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait bellowing the twin slogans of "Allahu Akbar" and "Har Har Mahadev" from the stage in Muzaffarnagar.

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Ten-Lok Sabha seats across 11 western Uttar Pradesh's Jat belt districts, including Muzaffarnagar, voted on April 10, 2014. Amit Shah was the BJP's election in-charge of UP.

A couple of days later, at an informal chat with journalists at the BJP headquarters, Shah had a spring in his step and a smile on his face. He was confident the BJP was on course to win 60 of UP's 80 seats. The most that the BJP had ever bagged in UP was 57 in 1998.

Feedback from cadres on the first phase of polling in UP, on April 10, had convinced Shah of a pachua bayar, a west wind, rising from western UP and blowing across the state to sweep UP's 80 seats in favour of the BJP. The BJP and its allies won 73 seats.

But that day, with election results still a month away, Shah's confidence was founded in the social realities of the region. The communal riots of August 2013 in Muzaffarnagar had severed whatever had remained of Chaudhary Charan Singh's MAJGAR social alliance.

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In the 1960s, Charan Singh constructed an alliance of peasant castes of Ahirs (Yadavs), Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs, abbreviated to AJGAR. It eventually also included Muslims.

These castes of the middle peasantry had benefitted from Green Revolution. But they also had common concerns with agriculture and shared the same social milieu in their villages, which brought them together on election days.

Charan Singh emerged as their unquestioned leader, and his exit from the Congress also meant the party's inexorable decline started in UP politics post-1967.

The MAJGAR alliance weakened in the years after his death, but the Jat and Muslim unity survived. Charan Singh's successors, son Ajit Singh and grandson Jayant Chaudhary, enfeebled that too in 2009.

For the Lok Sabha polls that year, their party, the Rashtriya Lok Dal, allied with the BJP. It severed the Jat and Muslim social alliance. And the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots sounded its death knell.

The BJP built on its success of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in the 2017 Assembly polls, winning 135 of 148 seats of the region. With many Jats in the armed forces, the Pulwama and Balakot incidents influenced the voting patterns in the area in the 2019 Lok Sabha.

Seven-year itch?

In 1989, Mahendra Singh Tikait, father of BKU leaders Naresh and Rakesh Tikait, held a 40-day agitation to return an abducted Muslim girl, Nayeema. It was also usual for Tikait senior to ensure separate enclosures for offering namaz and singing bhajans during his prolonged agitations, including on Delhi's Boat Club lawns in 1988.

In January this year, as the farmers' movement seemed to peter out, Muslim leaders of western UP gave the call to the community to support the two Tikait brothers. They attended the mahapanchayat that Naresh Tikait, the elder of the two brothers, organised in January at their native village Sisauli in Muzaffarnagar. The leaders of the two communities decided to let bygones be bygones.

The question is whether this rediscovered brotherhood percolates down and reflect in the voting pattern in the Assembly polls six months from now. Or will one potentially polarising incident engulf the region in another round of communal violence?

Muslims comprise 25 per cent, and Jats are 17 per cent of western UP's population. In the panchayat polls held in April, the RLD and SP supported candidates defeated several of the BJP's candidates in the region.

Across UP, people are upset with the increase in cooking gas prices and inflation. Would the people have forgotten the deaths from Covid-19 and official mismanagement in six months?

The Yogi Adityanath government has time on its hands to repair the damage. It could increase the state advised price (SAP) for sugarcane. The Centre and state government could increase the quantum and numbers covered under the PM Kisan Nidhi. In the run-up to the UP Assembly polls in 2017, the BJP had promised a farm loan waiver.

Other steps the state government is reportedly mulling include reducing power tariffs and more Jats and Gujjars in UP's council of ministers.

Would all of this be enough? Is it too late for the BJP to stop the western winds of change that might blow across UP in February 2022? Many believe the opposition in UP is too weak to take on Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath-led BJP. But as Chaudhary Charan Singh and Mahendra Singh Tikaith showed those many years back, the people of India can throw up surprises.