In BJP’S worries, boost for the Opposition Rivals joining hands poses new test for UP’S ruling party, admit leaders
By the standards it has set since the assembly elections in late 2013, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is certain to be disappointed with the results to the latest round of bypolls.
Of the four Lok Sabha seats and the 10 assembly seats at stake, the BJP and its allies won two of the first and only one of the second kind. More significantly, it lost the Kairana Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, continuing its dismal record in the state over the past few months.
The BJP has got a reason to worry in Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 (the number increased to 73 with allies winning two seats), and where growing unity among opposition seems to have brought its juggernaut to a halt yet again. Two party leaders who asked not to be identified admitted that they were worried.
The BJP said bypolls are influenced by local issues. “We lost by-polls in Uttar Pradesh in 2014, but won the assembly elections (in 2017) with a huge margin. The Congress has been designated as a peripheral player in present day politics. It is cheerleading for regional parties,” BJP spokesman Sambit Patra said.
The Congress did win more assembly seats on Thursday than the BJP (4 compared to 1) but it did not contest three of the Lok Sabha elections, opting instead to support candidates of other parties. Patra said that in 2019, people would vote for the PM – wherein P stands for ‘performance’ and M for ‘Mehnat’ (work), according to him.
Only a few months ago, in UP, an alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) wrested Gorakhpur and Phulpur – the parliamentary seats of chief minister Yogi Adityanath and deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya – from the BJP. “Losing 10 of 11 Lok Sabha by-elections should worry BJP, anti incumbency has set in. It won states due to anti incumbency against Congress governments,” Sanjay Kumar, director of the centre for the study of developing societies, wrote on Twitter, referring to all the by-elections to parliamentary seats since 2014.
The BJP’S defeat, party insiders admit, has several messages for the party. The most important is the fact that it is possible for Jats and Muslims to vote for a common candidate in western Uttar Pradesh which could spell trouble for the BJP in the 2019 general election wherein it will largely depend on consolidation of Hindu votes to sail through. That turns the logic of the party’s famed social engineering on its head.
One of the two leaders cited in the first instance, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said: “More than Jat-muslim unity, shift of the non-jatav voters away from us is a cause of worry. They voted for us in the last two elections.” Dalits account for 21.2% and Muslims 19.2% of Uttar Pradesh’s population. “The arithmetic was against us,” the MP said.
The second, a BJP office bearer argued that it was the undeclared support of the Bahujan Samaj Party that may have titled the balance in the favour of the RLD-SP candidate.
The two BJP leaders said aggressive backward mobilization, an extensive outreach towards non-jatav Dalits and careful selection of candidates was the way forward if the party has to retain its hold over country’s most populous state.
The second message of the by-poll, according to the BJP leaders is that the party has a real challenge when faced with a united opposition and a nagging ally. Interestingly, this was evident even in the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency in Maharashtra which the BJP retained by defeating its ally, Shiv Sena.