On Hanuman Jayanti this week, saffron flags dominated bhandaras (community kitchens where food is distributed during festivals) across Meerut city where BJP and RSS workers canvassed not for the cinematic Bhagwan Ram, actor Arun Govil famous for playing Ram in the 1980s tele serial Ramayana, who is the BJP candidate from Meerut, but for the “coronation” of PM Narendra Modi.
This is a theme running across this region where the BJP has been the dominant player and had won, in 2019, seven of the eight seats going to polls in the second phase on Friday.
In Meerut, the BJP has replaced the two-term sitting MP, Rajendra Aggarwal, with an outsider like Arun Govil who is locked in a keen contest with Sunita Verma, the first Dalit woman to have become Mayor of the city in 2017.
Meerut is large constituency of about 24 lakh voters of which Dalits comprise the biggest chunk of about five lakh voters followed closely by Muslims who are about 4.80 lakh in number. There are over two lakh Brahmins and over a one lakh Jats in this constituency. The BJP had won it narrowly by about 4,000 votes in 2019 when the SP and the BSP fought as alliance partners, consolidating the Dalit and Muslim votes. This time, the SP has tried to compensate for its absence of alliance with the BSP by fielding a Dalit candidate whose posters and banners proudly proclaim her Jatav identity. Of the eight constituencies going to polls on Friday, this is one seat the SP believes it has a distinct chance.
But the BJP believes it is indefatigable in this region.
“Last time, when the SP and the BSP had an alliance with the BSP having a support base of over 1.5-2 lakh in each of these constituencies, we still won seven of the eight seats in this phase. We will win all eight this time,” said Abhay Kumar Singh who heads the BJP’s Paschim Kshetra (western region) unit located in Meerut.
Singh is overseeing elections in 14 seats across the western region and is quietly confident of victory. The BJP has divided the entire state in six regions – Paschim, Braj, Awadh, Kanpur, Kashi and Gorakhpur. Within each of the six regions, different district units are located. Within districts, there are Mandal units which encompass sectors which include different booths and from the booths, the party structure goes down to electoral rolls. For each page of the electoral roll, the BJP has appointed one supervisor who goes by the name of ‘Panna Pramukh’. The Panna Pramukh’s primary responsibility is to reach each voter on that page and bring them out to vote. With this structure, the BJP gets down to campaign, assisting the candidate in every aspect of campaigning.
The structure with its outreach helps in warding off any popular discontent that may plague individual candidates. For instance, in Mathura, the sitting MP Hema Malini is meeting a lot of resistance, not just from the common people but also party workers who believe she is unavailable. A former RSS worker Suresh Singh has been given the ticket from Mathura by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) this time and he’s campaigning along with local big-wig and long- time MLA from Mant assembly seat, Shyam Sunder Sharma. They both have issued a public challenge to Hema Malini to name ten villages in the Mathura district without being coached. The Congress candidate Mukesh Dhangar’s hoardings sum up the situation – “Nahin chahiye pravaasi, abki baar Brijwaasi (we do not want an outsider but an inhabitant of Braj region this time)”.
The BJP has a bit of a challenge in Amroha where the sitting MP Kunwar Danish Ali is contesting on an SP ticket this time. However, without an alliance with the BSP, which has a chunk of Dalit votes in the seat, it is not easy for Danish Ali to reclaim this seat.
In Gautam Buddha Nagar, Ghaziabad, Aligarh and Bulandshahr, all of which have been won by the BJP for several terms by large margins, the party does not see much of a challenge. In Baghpat, a Jat dominated seat, the alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) is helping the BJP.