March 13, 2018 would indeed be a crucial day for Uttar Pradesh politics, and by extension, the politics of the country. Slated on that day are by-election results to the Lok Sabha seats of Gorakhpur which has for decades been the citadel of the current chief minister Yogi Adityanath, and Phulpur, which was represented by Keshav Prasad Maurya until he became deputy chief minister in Lucknow.
The contests are truly prestigious ones and the outcome would be a pointer to the shape of things to come in the political arena. What has injected an element of drama into the two by-elections is the decision of Bahujan Samaj Party’s supremo Mayawati to not put up its own candidates but instead support the nominee of its erstwhile arch-foe the Samajwadi Party with the intent to defeat the two BJP proxies through a consolidation of the vote banks of both parties.
Both Mayawati and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav are acutely aware that if U P is the ladder for the BJP to reach up to its goal of a second term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they can ill afford to lose these two prestige battles in the run-up to the high-stakes 2019 electoral contest. But, any calculations on the basis of caste dynamics could go awfully wrong with the pulling power of Modi and the organisational skill of party president Amit Shah neutralising the caste factor.
Yogi Adityanath was handpicked by Modi to navigate the country’s most populous state through the make-or-break 2019 battle while Maurya was chosen by the party high command to woo the other backward classes to vote BJP in the same battle of battles.
Failure to win either or both these contests would deal a huge blow to the BJP’s ambition to replicate the spectacular 2014 win that catapulted the party to centre-stage nationally. But considering that the BJP had swept the polls riding on a Modi wave, a less impressive performance could jeopardise the crowd-pulling Modi’s re-election this time around.
Doubtlessly, the BJP would leave nothing to chance but that only heightens the crucial nature of the two contests. If the SP nominees were to trounce the BJP candidates, the BSP-SP honeymoon could well continue into 2019 and beyond. But if the experiment fails to stop the BJP juggernaut in the by-elections, the courtship of these strange bedfellows could well end up in trouble.
Wily Mayawati has already made it clear that the tie-up for the byelections does not amount to a formal alliance and is no pointer to a tie-up for the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Yet, if the experiment were to work well, such an alliance could well be on the cards for 2019.
If the Lok Sabha election in 2014 and the Assembly election in 2017 are anything to go by, the BSP has shrunk to its core, unable to win support outside the Dalit caste of Jatavs. Earlier, with the backing of an assorted group of Dalits, non-Yadav backward classes and minorities, the BSP was able to win a substantial number of seats in the first-past-the-post system.
The BSP has an axe to grind in defeating the BJP candidates. In the Modi ‘wave’ in 2014, it had drawn a blank in the Lok Sabha. Subsequently, in the wake of demonetisation of high-value currency, the party offices and bank accounts were raided extensively and crores of unaccounted money recovered. In the 2017 Assembly elections, it was mauled and driven to the wall by the BJP.
Mayawati breathes fire against the BJP and nothing would give her greater satisfaction than seeing it beaten and humiliated. Its latest reconciliation with SP is with that goal. Akhilesh, too, loathes the BJP after his party’s crushing defeat in the last Assembly elections which robbed him of the cushy job of chief minister. He is young and tends to go at a tangent against Modi especially in private gatherings. He is indeed itching for a showdown in which he may take his revenge on the BJP.
The Congress is seeing visions of a ‘mahagathbandhan’ like in Bihar where opposition forces led by Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav and supported by the Congress humbled the BJP comprehensively. But there are wide differences in the circumstances in Bihar and U P and it would be foolhardy to expect a repeat of the 2015 Bihar example.
The Congress was a marginal player in Bihar and so it will be in the U P bypolls. Knowing full well that it does not stand a ghost of a chance to win, it has taken a tactical decision to contest both seats, hoping to wean away some of the Brahmin votes from the BJP.
Both its candidates Surhita Chatterjee Karim from Gorakhpur and Manish Mishra from Phulpur are Brahmins. But so lacklustre has been the Congress campaign so far that any impactful performance appears very doubtful. It is indeed a pity that caste arithmetic continues to play a big part in U P elections. But the 2019 Lok Sabha elections will be a barometer of how strong is the caste pull. If the BSP supports the SP nominees, it needs to be seen to what extent the BSP caste vote banks shift to the SP, particularly since the two parties have had a long history of fierce antagonism.
The Muslim vote bank has for long been splitting between the SP and the BSP. Will it this time pitch in for the SP candidates en masse? Will Muslim women, gratified with the BJP for pushing the triple talaq bill, break ranks with the men? The answer will unravel when the ballot boxes open on March 13.
The writer is a political commentator and columnist. He has authored four books.
