Uttar Pradesh is springing on to the national political chessboard, with only about eight months left for the next assembly polls. The assembly elections apart, its ramifications on the 2024 parliament polls too are uppermost in the minds of the BJP-RSS leaderships as they scurry around to set the UP house in order. The scent of a cabinet expansion is felt in Lucknow, curiously at this late hour when the BJP government in the state has already exhausted most of its term and should rather be in winding-down mode. The reason is clear – something needs to be done urgently to lift the sagging image of the party and the Yogi Adityanath-led government in the state. On its own, the Yogi government has failed to enthuse the masses. It rather antagonized sections of the population with its Hindutva agenda. Waiting in the wings to gain electoral support is the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav, if the results of the recent panchayat polls are any indication. Even if an alliance of the BSP of Mayawati and the Congress is cobbled, the political situation in UP is shaping in the same defiant form as it did in West Bengal.
At the same time, the stock of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is down and it might no longer be possible for him to effectively stand in the forefront and seek votes for the BJP in the assembly polls. Curiously, his own Varanasi and Yogi’s Gorakhpur as also Ayodhya saw reverses for the BJP in the civic polls. Modi, himself being on the defensive, is reportedly attempting a cabinet expansion as his present team is largely a washout, wanting in action and forward momentum. The drift is all too palpable. What happened in West Bengal was prominently a Muslim consolidation against the BJP, backed also by the support that Mamata Banerjee and her TMC won from women voters. Muslims form nearly a quarter of the population in Uttar Pradesh and the result in West Bengal came as music to their ears. A matching Hindu consolidation is not possible in Uttar Pradesh. How the BJP would seek to work its way up in the present contest is anybody’s guess. The RSS machinery is getting active in Uttar Pradesh too, sensing a likely drubbing for the BJP if things progressed this way. Problem is, there is too little time for the BJP and the Yogi government to start retrieving its stock. It’s too late and even a new leader at the helm might not be of much help.
