This month’s assembly polls in four states and one Union Territory may have grabbed the headlines for the moment, but the real challenge for the ruling BJP is India’s politically most crucial election in Uttar Pradesh next year.
Shrill claims by party leaders and its cheerleaders predicting a landslide win for a third successive term could turn out to be premature. This is mainly because of the entirely bipolar contest emerging between the BJP and an increasingly muscular regional heavyweight, the Samajwadi Party.
Other parties, including the former behemoth Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the shrunken shadow of the once mighty Congress, have fallen by the wayside over the past decade and are fast losing their relevance.
Barring a few limited alliances, the fight will be a direct one between the ruling BJP, led by saffron-clad monk Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav, son and successor of the late formidable peasant patriarch Mulayam Singh.
BJP’s rise and shifting political dynamics
The phenomenal rise of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh from the 2014 Lok Sabha election onwards has made it the central political pole in the state for over a decade. It has done so by adding to its core upper-caste base sizeable portions of the middle and backward castes, and fragments of various Dalit sub-castes, in the guise of an all-embracing Hindutva spread through sustained grassroots propaganda.
In contrast, the two regional players, the Samajwadi Party and the BSP, who had been the main contenders over the previous two decades, have palpably lost their electoral clout because of both diminished organisational reach on the ground and the absence of a larger electoral strategy. The Congress, meanwhile, continued its steep dive in the home state of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Signs of Samajwadi resurgence
However, there have been growing signals in recent years that political dynamics are once again changing in Uttar Pradesh. This was evident even in the previous state Assembly polls in 2022, which the BJP comfortably won, bagging 255 of the 403 elected Assembly seats, but which also marked the unmistakable revival of the Samajwadi Party, which emerged victorious in as many as 111 seats.
More significantly, the BJP, which had swept the previous Assembly polls, lost 57 seats, while the Samajwadi gained a stunning 65 seats. To underline the bipolar nature of the elections, the two other parties that contested separately, the BSP and the Congress, barely managed to register their presence in the polls, getting one and two seats respectively.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the Samajwadi Party gathered further momentum in Uttar Pradesh. It actually managed to get more seats than the BJP, winning 37 to the latter’s 33 out of the total 80 seats. The Congress, riding piggyback on the Samajwadi Party in an alliance, won six, and the BSP got wiped out in the Lower House, unable to win a single seat, with its vote share dipping to single figures for the first time in decades in its political bastion.
Caste equations reshape political battlefield
Two major reasons appear to have propelled the Samajwadi Party’s bid to be a serious challenger in the coming Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls to the seemingly invincible BJP juggernaut. The first is the fractures appearing in the BJP’s social alliance under the Hindutva umbrella held aloft by the larger-than-life Yogi Adityanath. The second is the mounting popular resonance of Akhilesh Yadav’s PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpasankhyak) plank that seeks to bring together backward castes, Dalits, and minorities on a common platform.
In their post-mortem on the BJP’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls, both the central and state party leadership, along with the RSS, had pinpointed the disenchantment of backward caste and Dalit voters with their marginal influence in the corridors of power in Uttar Pradesh, still dominated by upper castes. Significantly, after much consideration, the BJP recently appointed Pankaj Chaudhry from the electorally important Kurmi backward caste as its state president. This has no doubt sent ripples of disquiet among its Brahmin and Rajput vote banks.
Interestingly, there have been a series of separate closed-door meetings between legislators belonging to different castes, including Rajputs, Brahmins, Kurmis, and Lodhs. The most recent meeting was barely a month ago, when as many as 52 BJP legislators and councillors, all Brahmins, met for dinner.
Samajwadi consolidation and BSP decline
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, on the other hand, has a firm grip on his Yadav clan, a significant force in Uttar Pradesh politics, and is showing signs of regaining the support of a variety of other backward castes his party enjoyed under his father. He is also poised to be the main beneficiary of the BSP’s potential disintegration. The Yadav scion could get a huge windfall by bagging a substantial chunk of the BSP vote, estimated to be 13 per cent last time, despite yielding just one seat.
Over the past few years, as BSP supremo Mayawati’s popular charisma has rapidly diminished, along with the winnability of her party candidates, there has been a steady stream of the BSP old guard, including a dozen of Behenji’s former ministers, joining the Samajwadi Party, sometimes ironically after a stint in the BJP.
This, along with the likelihood of smaller Dalit groups like the Azad Samaj Party led by Chandrashekhar Azad and Swami Prasad Maurya’s Rashtriya Shoshit Samaj inclined to support the Samajwadi Party rather than the BJP, could be a game changer, particularly in western Uttar Pradesh, one of the few regions where it got fewer seats than the BJP in the 2024 parliamentary polls.
Finally, the complete marginalisation of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the latest blow coming from one of its few influential Muslim leaders, Nasimuddin Siddiqui, joining the Samajwadi Party, means the sizeable Muslim vote in the state could consolidate behind Akhilesh Yadav.
BJP remains frontrunner despite challenges
Yet, it would be naïve to underestimate the difficulties of dislodging the Sangh establishment in Uttar Pradesh, given the personal charisma of Yogi Adityanath, the massive RSS reach among the masses, and the BJP’s enormous money and power. The ruling party is still the frontrunner in next year’s polls, but the Samajwadi Party could put up a very tough fight.
The writer is a senior journalist.
