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The voter enthusiasm for the Samajwadi Party’s chief ministerial candidate Akhilesh Yadav was evident from over 62 per cent polling till 5 pm at Karhal seat in the Yadavs’ bastion district, Mainpuri, as the third phase of Assembly elections concluded on Sunday.
The BJP had trounced the Yadav clan in their pocket-borough that includes swathes of Mainpuri, Itawah, Etah, Firozabad, Furrukhabad and Kannauj districts in the central parts of UP in the 2017 elections, reducing the SP to just six of the 20 seats. Overall, the BJP had won a whopping 49 of the total 59 seats in the total 16 districts that poll in the third phase in 2017.
Largely, the voters in the Yadav heartland attribute the losses incurred then to the split in the SP due to the animosity between Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle Shivpal Yadav. This time around, the two have patched up and held joint rallies and roadshows with the family patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. The result is a unity that is reflected in six districts where the Yadavas are estimated to constitute over 38 per cent of the electorate.
Morale boost
At the Jaswantnagar seat in Etawah district from where Shivpal Yadav had survived even the massive BJP wave in 2017 and won by a margin of about 50,000 votes, the SP supporters are vocal about their affiliation with the “uncle” and the positive results that would come of the unity between chacha-bhatija (uncle and nephew)”. “Chacha had won by 50,000 last time. The margin this time will be over 1 lakh,” said Yudvir Singh Yadav from Jaswantnagar.
In the Karhal seat where the BJP bigwig Amit Shah had asked the voters to “give us this one seat and we will sweep them (SP) out” in the last leg of the campaign, voters, especially women and the younger lot were seen enthusiastically polling “to elect our CM”. In several polling booths in Karhal, the BJP had not bothered to depute polling agents.
BJP’s hope
What the BJP loses out in the six districts in the “Yadav belt” it hopes to make up in the southern regions of Bundelkhand that comprises districts such as Jalaun, Jhansi, Lalitpur where the ruling party had won all the 19 seats in the 2017 elections. BJP has a strong caste support base of Thakurs in this arid, backward region along with the Scheduled Caste voters who had shifted away from their traditional choice of the BSP.
The BJP hopes that the SC and lower OBC voter will continue to support largely owing to the free ration and the promise of maintaining law and order by the Yogi Adityanath government. The party’s upper caste vote remains intact, especially among the Thakurs who have been vociferous in their opposition to the SP.
“We don’t want the goonda raj to come back to UP. There has not been a single riot of the scale of Muzaffarnagar riots that took place under the SP’s watch. The police act in a disciplined way and the local mafia an corruption have been contained,” said Anupam Singh, a landowner from Jalaun.
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