IS BSP THE FRONT-RUNNER IN UTTAR PRADESH?
By Amulya Ganguli
Having made a mess of the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) electoral prospects in UP by sparking off internecine squabbling, the party’s national president, Mulayam Singh Yadav, is trying to make amends by replicating Bihar’s pattern of a mahagathbandhan or a grand alliance in next year’s assembly elections in the state.
But the ironies of this attempt are obvious. For a start, when the grand alliance took shape in Bihar, the SP was a part of the group. But, then, it walked out presumably because Mulayam Singh was dissatisfied with the number of seats which were offered to it.
This was not the first time when Mulayam Singh had scuttled an attempt for setting up a non-BJP alliance. Earlier, he had ensured that the so-called Janata “parivar” on the lines of the 1977 formation would not be constituted, thereby confirming his reputation as a spoiler as when he ditched the Congress even as Sonia Gandhi was claiming in 1999 that her party had the support of 272 M.P.s, including those of the SP.
Given such a dubious track record, it is unlikely that Mulayam Singh’s initiatives to repair the damage caused to his party by the confrontation between his son, chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, and the latter’s uncle, Shivpal Singh Yadav (who is backed by Mulayam Singh), by forming a large political conglomerate will succeed.
For one, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar will be wary of aligning with Mulayam Singh just over a year after the Bihar experience. Besides, Nitish Kumar has been toying with the idea of forming an alliance in U.P. with himself as the patron. For another, even a party like the Congress, which is expected to be no more than an “also ran” in the UP elections, may favour going along with Akhilesh rather than with Mulayam because of the former’s clean image.
Only the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s Ajit Singh may be interested in view of the fact that he has been in the wilderness ever since the fall of the Manmohan Singh government in which he was a minister. However, Shivpal Singh’s attempt to bring together the so-called Lohiates in the Janata Dal (United) and the followers of former prime minister Charan Singh is unlikely to be a resounding success.
Similarly, the chances of success of the powwow between Mulayam Singh and the Congress’s poll strategist, Prashant Kishor, about putting up a united front against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are minimal because the Congress is yet to make up its mind on either a partner or on going it alone.
Given these cross-currents, which party is the front-runner in UP?
In the immediate aftermath of the surgical strikes by the Indian army on the staging posts of the terrorists across the Line of Control in Pakistan, it appeared that the BJP might be able to repeat its stellar performance of 2014 when the party won 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Its ally, the Apna Dal, won two.
Since then, however, several developments have gone against the BJP. First, it is unlikely that the support which the party received from about 10 per cent of the Muslims in UP in 2014 – the highest in the BJP’s electoral history – will be repeated in the wake of the revival by the Narendra Modi government of the idea of a uniform civil code which the Muslims regard as a curtailment of their personal laws.
Secondly, the apparently cold-blooded killing of eight escaped prisoners of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in a fake encounter may antagonise the Muslims, especially with the Congress and other opposition parties targeting the BJP over the incident.
In normal circumstances, a sizeable chunk of the Muslim votes would have been expected to go to the SP. But the comment of the party’s influential Muslim leader, Azam Khan, that the minorities will not support an unreliable party shows how the infighting has hurt the SP.
It is believed, therefore, that the gainer will be the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) if only because the party is expected to recover the Dalit votes which it lost to the BJP in 2014 when the BJP received more Dalit votes at the national level than ever before – 24 per cent compared to 19 per cent secured by the Congress and 14 per cent by the BSP.
However, the lynching of Dalit young men in Una in Gujarat and Rohith Vemula’s suicide in Hyderabad are among the incidents which have alienated the community from the BJP.
If the Dalits, who comprise 21.3 per cent of U.P.’s population, and the Muslims, who make up 19.3 per cent, move in large numbers to the BSP, its leader Mayawati’s expectation of surging ahead of the SP and the BJP is likely to be fulfilled.
One of the BJP’s problems is that it doesn’t have a chief ministerial candidate while the BSP has Mayawati, the SP Akhilesh and the Congress Sheila Dikshit although she has become invisible of late. The BJP’s 2014 victory was based on Modi’s popularity. But this time, the party will have to bank on Modi’s proactive Pakistan policy to win votes. But that may not be enough. (IPA Service)