For all the parties in the fray, this is a difficult election: With two of the seven phases of the ongoing Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls behind us, there is still no overriding issue agitating voters statewide. There is nothing, for instance, like the Modi wave of 2014 that helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sweep UP in the Lok Sabha polls. Nor the sort of definite direction the last two Assembly elections took.

In 2007, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati swept into office on a promise to end Yadav lawlessness, combined with the soothing sounds of sarvajan (party for all, as opposed to just bahujan , or the ‘majority’ made of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes). Five years later, dead health officials, funds looted from the rural job guarantee scheme MGNREGA and a frenzy of statue-building saw voters put their might behind the Samajwadi Party (SP) to return it to power.

Of course, in the current election, Akhilesh Yadav has dominated political conversations. In my journeys through western and central UP, from September 2016 — when the Yadav family feud first spilled on to the streets of Lucknow — to recent weeks, I watched as the fate of the State’s young chief minister filled the mind-space of voters. Even those who said they were not SP supporters, spoke positively of him: Phrases such as “ bada jolly-sa ladka hain (he is a pleasant youth)” to “ layak beta hain (he’s a worthy son)” peppered their conversations.

The family war — with father Mulayam Singh Yadav and uncle Shivpal Yadav on the opposite side — may have taken on epic proportions, but the young CM’s conduct, as it played out on TV screens across the country, was impeccable. He demonstrated both self-belief and self-possession, never losing his nerve or composure in circumstances that a lesser person would have cracked under.

In the process, his image underwent a miraculous transformation — from a lame-duck CM, thwarted at every step by an authoritarian father and a gang of interfering uncles, to a heroic David-like figure. In less than six months, he shed all the anti-incumbency his five years in office had accumulated, be it the inept handling of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, or the free run his Yadav kinsmen had in the State. All of that is in the trash can with uncle Shivpal and the many unsavoury SP legislators who have not been re-nominated.

Last month, a day after Akhilesh won his right to keep the faction-riven SP’s cycle symbol, I arrived in Muzaffarnagar (in western UP) to find the talk revolving around whether an alliance with the Congress was possible. As the week progressed, and the two parties fought over the sharing of seats, the euphoria died down. By the time I reached Bareilly four days later, dejection was writ large on the faces of Muslims, the driving force behind the alliance. Congress president Sonia Gandhi made a last-minute intervention through emissaries and the deal was signed within 24 hours.

The surprise element was the SP’s generosity in allotting over 100 seats to the Congress even though the latter’s 2012 tally was just 28. But Akhilesh knew that Mayawati’s hectic efforts to create a Dalit-Muslim platform, assigning over 100 tickets to the minority community, posed a threat. He needed to quickly shore up his flanks to consolidate the 19.4 per cent Muslim vote share in the State.

But while the SP felt the Congress would help strengthen its Muslim base and soften its image among upper castes, it decided to exclude the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) from the alliance. The SP was concerned that the Jats, the mainstay of the RLD, would drive away the Muslims: even today, though there is no overt communal polarisation in western UP, memories of Jat-Muslim enmity forged in the communal conflagration in Muzaffarnagar haven’t faded away entirely.

The SP-Congress combine, however, may have erred in its reading of the situation. Reports on the first polling phase indicate that the numerically strong Jats voted overwhelmingly for the RLD; in seats where the RLD fielded “winning” candidates, whether Jats or Muslims, the two communities temporarily buried their antipathy to try and defeat the BJP. An electoral understanding with the RLD, therefore, could have helped the SP-Congress alliance emerge first in this traditionally BJP-BSP stronghold.

In 2014, the Jats had voted en masse for the BJP; this time, the community turned against it. Already upset that the party had slighted their leader Chaudhury Charan Singh by not mentioning him in the campaign speeches and evicting his son, Ajit Singh, from the Lutyens bungalow he once occupied, they are also angry that their demand for reservation has not been accepted, and that sugarcane prices have not been enhanced. Lastly, demonetisation has devastated the agricultural economy.

Implementing the SP-Congress pact on the ground has also proved tougher than imagined, as I discovered, even in the Gandhi bastion of Rae Bareli and Amethi. The Congress’s demand for all 10 seats here, despite its consistently poor performance in Assembly polls, was not taken kindly by local SP workers.

Later, SP spokespersons in Lucknow told me that party cadres had been directed to concentrate on ensuring a second term in power for Akhilesh rather than get mired in local rivalries. Some change was visible by the time I reached Allahabad on February 2. Asked what the two parties brought to the table, pat came an answer from an SP worker — not a Yadav but a member of the backward community of Pals: “ Ham la rahain hain shakti , Congress la raha hain vishwas (we bring strength, the Congress trust and goodwill).”

As the squabbling died down, Akhilesh and Rahul Gandhi hit the streets jointly, doing roadshows across western UP, which went to the polls first. When they rolled into Agra, long-time residents were stunned at the reception the two young men got. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP’s chief campaigner, was beginning to look jaded — and grim — by comparison, BJP president Amit Shah was forced to cancel several public meetings when the anticipated numbers didn’t show up. Mayawati is drawing large crowds at her rallies but they are largely dalits: besides, as in the past, she has been suffering from a deficit of media attention.

By dubbing Akhilesh and Rahul as “UP ke ladke ”, their spin doctors — without directly saying so — also emphasised that the BJP is dominated by Gujarati “outsiders” Modi and Shah, recalling the 2015 Bihar campaign in which CM Nitish Kumar played the local pride card to the advantage of his grand alliance.

In the 2007 and 2012 Assembly polls, the SP and BSP were the main contenders as the BJP had fallen off the map. But the emergence of Modi on the national stage in 2014 has pushed the party to the centre of the battle for Lucknow. If the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots set the stage for Hindu-Muslim polarisation, Modi’s OBC credentials replicated the allure the party held out during Kalyan Singh’s heyday, with a large section of the non-Yadav backward castes combining with the upper castes to give the BJP a whopping 42 per cent of the vote and 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the State.

In this year’s elections, all three parties are beset by difficulties. The BJP not only does not have a local face to draw in voters, its leadership’s choice of candidates has sparked off mini-mutinies in many districts. The Jats, who played a critical role in the BJP’s UP sweep in 2014, have revolted. And if the intensity of Hindu-Muslim polarisation has lessened, it is still unclear how anger against demonetisation, especially among farmers and traders, will play out electorally. Additionally, the RSS and its affiliates, who played a stellar behind-the-scenes role in 2014, are disenchanted, particularly because many of their protégés have not been given tickets.

Panicking, the BJP has now returned to its core Hindutva agenda, trying to whip up emotions with its promise of anti-Romeo squads (‘love jihad’ in a new bottle), shutting slaughterhouses, and putting the Ram Temple issue, the Uniform Civil Code and triple talaq back on its agenda. Dogwhistle politics is back, as Yogi Adityanath has been given a free run of western UP, an area he was earlier kept away from by a party leadership wary of his influence growing beyond Purvanchal.

The BSP, missing in action for close to five years, has been sought to be revived belatedly by Mayawati. The shock of the 2014 general election results, which denied her even one Lok Sabha seat and dragged her vote share below 20 per cent, had galvanised her into action. But a resurgent BJP poached on the BSP: 2015 and 2016 saw an exodus of top party leaders — including Swami Prasad Maurya, Jugal Kishore, Dara Singh Chauhan, Brajesh Pathak, Babu Singh Kushwaha, and RK Choudhury — largely to the BJP. They all represent important backward castes (except Pathak, a brahmin) and their departure sent a negative message to their respective followers. The upper castes, particularly the brahmins, who played a critical role in bringing Mayawati to power in 2007, were no longer with her, despite the reassuring presence of Rajya Sabha MP Satish Mishra next to her. She then embarked on forging Dalit-Muslim unity, but the minority community has not thus far responded too positively to her overtures. For the Muslims today, the presence of a Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre has alerted them to the dangers of dividing their votes. They are voting for the BSP only in constituencies that the SP-Congress candidates appear unable to win.

At a recent rally in Moradabad, Mayawati drew an impressive crowd, but it was mostly the party faithful: most importantly, however, there were very few Muslims. Now, she is trying to pull in individually strong candidates whose personal popularity can override considerations of caste — hence, for instance, the entry of Mukthar Ansari, who has enormous influence in the Ghazipur-Mau belt of eastern UP, or former SP leaders Ambika Choudhury and Narad Yadav in Ballia. Reports suggest that there has been a late revival of the party in those parts as a result. The SP, on the other hand, which started out with the burden of anti-incumbency and a family feud, has succeeded in riding the storm. Most of its troubles appear to be behind it, with the Akhilesh-Rahul combine ushering in the promise of a “new generation” that would carve out a “new path” with a “new outlook”, as Akhilesh said in a recent election speech.

The answer to who will win these elections lies in the answers to four critical questions: Will the Jats stay with the BJP or move to the RLD? Will Muslims largely vote for the SP-Congress alliance or get divided? Can BJP polarise these elections again? Will the Yadav vote in the community stronghold of Mainpuri, Etawah, Etah and Kannauj, get divided between the official SP candidates and Shivpal’s rebels?

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