New caste calculus emerges in UP as BSP drifts

Akhilesh Yadav’s PDA plank is turning SP into the new home for Dalits, OBCs, and Muslims

Party-hopping is quite normal in the run-up to an election in India, but in Uttar Pradesh significant caste realignments are taking place with more than a year to go for the next Assembly polls.

Political competition is acute because of heightened political stakes in the 2027 Assembly polls. In 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 255 of the 403 seats, 57 fewer than the 312 it won in 2017. The BJP looks vulnerable after its Lok Sabha tally dropped to 37 out of 80 (in 2024) from 62 (in 2019).

The party that seems to be best positioned to take on the BJP in 2027 is the Samajwadi Party (SP). The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is in precipitous decline. The Congress has hitched its wagon to the SP with no other options available. Ambitious political leaders are strategically re-positioning themselves for 2027.

The latest to do so is Naseemuddin Siddiqui, a long-time BSP minister in the Mayawati government. Expelled from the BSP, he launched his own party — the National Bahujan Alliance — in 2017. Later, he joined the Congress, and quit the party in January. Earlier this week, Siddiqui joined the SP along with another former BSP minister Anees Ahmad Khan. Siddiqui claimed that 15,000 BSP workers had joined the SP along with him.

Siddiqui, a prominent Muslim leader of UP whose support base extends across Bundelkhand, perhaps hopes to fill the leadership gap created by SP leader Azam Khan, weakened by his legal troubles. The reaction of the Congress to Siddiqui jumping ship has been muted. This, even though it somewhat weakens the Muslim base of the Congress, the migration is to an alliance partner, and will make no difference to the overall consolidation of the minority vote behind the Congress-SP alliance.

The BSP is disintegrating because of Mayawati's timid political stance. BSP leaders, disappointed with their chief’s diminished avatar, see no future for themselves in her party, and are looking for political opportunities elsewhere.

The SP is becoming the party of choice for them, attracted by SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s PDA plank (Pichda, Dalit, and Alpsankhyak – Backwards, Dalits, and Minorities). The SP’s support base could expand beyond the Yadavs with the entry of BSP defectors.

Besides Siddiqui and Khan, these leaders include: Babu Singh Kushwaha, Lalji Verma, Indrajit Saroj, Daddu Prasad, Veer Singh, Badshah Singh, Akbar Hussain, Achal Rajbhar, Ram Prasad Choudhary, and Swami Prasad Maurya who had joined the BJP but has now moved to the SP. Several women leaders of the BSP have also joined the SP.

Akhilesh Yadav has received the largest share of BSP defectors with open arms, delighted at the unexpected acquisition of the BSP’s organisational and political muscle. With the SP becoming the new home for the BSP’s old guard, it will become the effective political platform for OBC, Dalit, and Muslim politics in UP.

A small but notable stream of BSP defectors has also made its way to the BJP. These are essentially opportunistic defectors. Even if they share no ideological affinity with the BJP, they are attracted by the immediate access to power structures and personal advancement promised by joining the ruling party.

A new politics of Dalit identity is being espoused by the Azad Samaj Party (ASP) of Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, as an alternative to the BSP. However, the party has not yet won more than symbolic victories, such as Azad winning the Nagina Lok Sabha constituency in the 2024 general elections. Nevertheless, younger and idealistic Dalit leaders are drawn to it.

The Congress has been trying for some time to fit into the new constellation of forces emerging in UP. It has no choice but to ally with SP to remain relevant. It is repositioning itself in the caste-fractured political landscape of UP on the same page as its alliance partner. Rahul Gandhi has taken the lead in the reinvention of the Congress as an OBC-friendly party by demanding a caste census, and coining the slogan ‘Jitni abaadi, utna haq’ (rights proportional to population).

If the Congress aims to metamorphose into an OBC-friendly party, what will it bring to the alliance with the SP, which is already a well-established OBC party? The Congress retains some pockets of Brahmin support in UP; they are not particularly inclined towards a Yadav-OBC leadership, but they realise they will be irrelevant without the SP. Also, by its OBC outreach, the Congress, perhaps, hopes to counter similar efforts by the BJP to the non-Yadav OBCs. It hopes that its messaging on the caste census will attract Kurmis, Lodha, Kushwahas, Nais, Mallahs and other non-Yadav OBCs who feel under-represented in politics, government jobs, and education.

A majority of the Muslims are aligned with the SP, but the Congress, perhaps, hopes to bring national-level credibility to their support as the minority community values pan-India representation. The Congress also brings its pockets of legacy voters in rural UP and the urban, secular, and educated middle class, women and youth voters who may be suspicious of SP’s regionalist approach. The Congress’ national, urban-liberal, welfarist, and strong gender-equity narrative has an appeal beyond the caste-based organisational approach of the SP.

Together the SP and the Congress will present themselves as the single secular umbrella under which OBCs, Dalits, Muslims, and pan-India secular voters can stand together. This is possibly the only reasonable explanation of Rahul Gandhi’s push for caste census as well as social justice.

The only unpredictable factor in the churning of UP’s caste politics is the National Census, which, in a concurrent exercise, will also enumerate the caste of individuals. This will be a digital census and start from April 1 with house-listing operations, followed by population enumeration. The impact of the census will be particularly acute in the politically caste-riven cow-belt states, the most politically weighty among them being UP.

If indicative trends of castes are available before the UP elections (which seems unlikely, but probable), the census data could give the BJP a tactical advantage. The census conducted by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Early access to caste census data may allow the Union government to shape welfare schemes and political messaging to attract non-Yadav OBCs and Dalits to the disadvantage of the Opposition.

Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.