BEATING THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME
HOW THE BJP RE-ENGINEERED THE CASTE ARITHMETIC TO PUT IT PAST ITS KEY RIVALS IN THE HEARTLAND
Barely five years ago, in 2012, the political map of Uttar Pradesh was a crimson-dominated rainbow, bearing the imprint of a spectacular Samajwadi Party victory over Mayawati’s blue brigade. This Holi, the rainbow has changed hue again—now it’s awash in saffron, with other shades jostling for presence. It signifies not just a power shift from the SP to the Bharatiya Janata Party—triggered by an extraordinary saffron surge—but the rout of the regional forces at the hands of a national party after a decade-and-a-half of eventful politics in the state.
To many, the BJP’s landslide in UP is a mere reassertion of the verdict of 2014, when the party won 71 of the state’s 80 seats (the NDA won 73) in the Lok Sabha election. However, the important question is what caused the two back-to-back landslides, in 2014 and 2017, for the BJP in less than three years. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the early 1990s had brought about the party’s previous peak during the three successive assembly elections in 1991, 1993 and 1996. Today, when the Ram temple issue lies dormant, sub judice in the Supreme Court, how does one explain the remarkable rise in the BJP’s stock in 2017? Apart from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership skills and extraordinary nationwide appeal since 2014, and BJP president Amit Shah’s enviable record and expertise in election management, the most obvious answer seems to be electoral and social realignment—substantive, decisive and durable shifts in voting preferences—in favour of the BJP.
One of the prerequisites of electoral realignment is high voter turnout, spurred by successful political mobilisation. For a state that has a record of low voting, UP saw its highest turnout of 61.1 per cent this election, up almost 2 percentage points from the 2012 average of 59.4 per cent. Given the size of the UP electorate (141 million in 2017, according to Election Commission data), even a small increase like this can be enormous in real terms.
The higher turnout this time was largely driven by women, who outnumbered the men by more than 3 percentage points. The Modi government’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, ensuring cooking gas cylinders to the poor, and the BJP’s image of zero tolerance on crime against women are thought to have encouraged more women to step out and vote for the party. Higher turnouts also bring in first-time voters in their droves, impacting election results. The BJP cornered 34 per cent of the votes in the 18-25 age group.
Socio-political movements in the past, such as the JP movement in 1977, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1991, the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption stir in 2011, have all ensured high turnouts in subsequent elections. Both in 2014 and 2017, the BJP’s attempt to spread its base through new branches of the party in remote areas appears to have paid off. The BJP also worked aggressively among students and through bodies such as the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Given the new rural outreach in 2014 and 2017, the BJP was able to break its image of an urban, middle-class party and sweep most of the countryside, particularly finding favour among the Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs) and Dalits other than Jatavs.
The india today post-poll data shows that while the BJP retained 62 per cent of its traditional voters among the upper castes, it was also able to woo EBC voters other than the Yadavs, securing 58 per cent of their vote. The EBCs that gravitated towards the BJP belonged primarily to the Lodh, Kushwaha, Kurmi, Koeri and Other Backward Castes (OBCs). The postpoll data shows the BJP drew the support of 57 per cent Kurmi voters, 63 per cent Lodh voters and 60 per cent OBCs. In western UP, the supposed anger of Jats against the BJP proved to be a myth. The party captured a sizeable 43 per cent of the Jat vote. It also succeeded in bagging 17 per cent of the Dalit vote, mainly from non-Jatav communities such as Pasi, Valmiki and Khatik. And though the SP got 80 per cent of the Yadav vote, only 18 per cent of the non-Yadavs went with it. The BSP was popular mainly among its core Dalit voter base, getting 62 per cent of Scheduled Castes votes, mainly Jatavs.
The BJP’s electoral and social realignment has almost routed the regional parties in UP. Just consider the decisive nature of their drubbing in 2017. The SP, which had won 224 out of UP’s 403 seats in 2012, has been reduced to a tally of 47 despite an alliance with the Congress, which was expected to consolidate the Muslim vote. This is the SP’s lowest tally ever. Ally Congress, which held the pole position in UP’s politics for the first few decades after independence, has shrunk to a pathetic seven seats, its lowest ever in an assembly poll in the state.
The BSP, which won 206 seats in 2007 and 80 in 2012, is down to 19 seats, its lowest tally since 1993. It bagged only two of the 85 reserved constituencies. The BSP’s whitewash means Mayawati will be in no position to be re-elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2018, when her term ends.
So punishing has been the SP’s defeat that 15 of its 25 contesting ministers lost, including prominent names such as Abhishek Misra, Ravidas Mehrotra, Kamal Akhtar and Arvind Singh Gope, as well as Gayatri Prajapati, who was arrested in Lucknow on March 15 on charges of rape. The SP even lost in its pocket boroughs—all four seats in the Yadav stronghold of Etah, two out of three seats it contested in Etawah (Shivpal Yadav was the only winner from Jaswantnagar), four out of five seats in Firozabad district, five out of six seats in Budaun district and two out of three seats in Kannauj, from where Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav is an MP.
Even in Azamgarh, the Lok Sabha seat of Mulayam Singh Yadav, the party could retain only five of the nine seats it won in 2012. Aparna Yadav, Mulayam’s other daughter-in-law, lost to Rita Bahuguna of the BJP in the prestigious Lucknow Cantonment seat.
Many factors brought the rout upon the satraps. The primary reason was the failure of the BJP’s rivals to stitch together a Bihar-style mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) that became the BJP’s nemesis in the Bihar assembly elections in 2015. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who created the template of the grand alliance, had warned the SP and the Congress at the time they sewed up their coalition in January that “no mahagathbandhan is possible in UP without the BSP and SP being a part of it”. According to him, the campaign against demonetisation has hurt the SP-Congress, since the poor see it as a drive against the corrupt rich by the Modi government.
THE FAILURE TO put together a grand alliance split the minority vote, benefiting the BJP. The BSP, SP and the Congress had all pinned their hopes on the 19 per cent Muslim vote in UP. The BSP was most aggressive in wooing the Muslims, providing them tickets in 99 seats and openly calling for a Dalit-Muslim alliance. The SP-Congress alliance was more subtle in its approach. One of the most important imperatives driving the alliance was the need to prevent a split of the minority vote. Yet, during the campaign, the two allies avoided making overt overtures towards Muslim voters. Nevertheless, the end result was a division in minority support. india today post-poll data shows the SP-Congress alliance got 70 per cent of the Muslim vote and the BSP 16 per cent. The fallout was ironic: of the 88 constituencies, where a fourth of the vote rests with the minority community, the BJP won 57. Only 28 seats went to the SP. The BSP won just three.
Muslim-dominated Saharanpur, Bareilly, Muzaffarnagar, Moradabad, Shamli, Bijnor and Sardhana in western UP and eastern UP’s Khalilabad, Tanda in Ambedkar Nagar, Gainsari and Shrawasti seats in Shrawasti district largely voted saffron. It is likely the BJP made rich gains in these seats due to counter-polarisation—consolidation of support from the majority community. However, a small section of Muslims, too, reportedly voted the BJP. india today post-poll data shows about 2 per cent Muslims voting for BJP plus allies. In some Muslim-dominated constituencies, including Deoband, Muslim women are reported to have voted for the BJP.
The SP suffered because of other factors too. The bitter family war in the Yadav clan, between Akhilesh Yadav and uncle Shivpal, caused intense inter-generational factionalism within the party. In the process, a weakened Akhilesh ended up giving too many seats to the Congress, which pulled the coalition’s share of seats and votes down. The SP’s weak record on law and order as well as corruption and criminal charges against key candidates, such as Prajapati, eroded its credibility.
Mayawati’s hubris, her failure to learn from the 2014 Lok Sabha drubbing—when her party drew a blank—and her myopic focus on minority votes wiped out her party. The BSP’s 22.2 per cent popular vote, a
fraction higher than the SP’s 21.8 per cent, should not be misread. It merely reflects the fact that the BSP contested all 403 seats while the SP was in the fray in 298.
Finally, it is the BJP’s landslide, the second after the Modi tsunami of 2014, that will resonate with the voters in elections in the future. The BJP’s gain in vote share in 2017 compared with 2012, without the backing of any popular movement, is impressive. With 39.7 per cent popular votes in 2017 compared with 15 per cent in 2012, the BJP’s vote share has more than doubled. It gained nearly 25 per cent votes, which is more than the vote share of each of its regional rivals.
The last time UP witnessed a saffron surge at the ballots was during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1991. The party bagged a 31 per cent vote share, and the charismatic Lodh leader Kalyan Singh became the chief minister. After the dismissal of his government by the Centre following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the BJP performed even better in 1993, with a 33 per cent vote share. In 1996, its vote share dipped slightly to 32 per cent. Thereafter, it was a continuous slide in the next three elections, down to 15 per cent—its lowest—in 2012. Both SP and BSP gained big during this entire period. Now, in 2017, the BJP’s successful social and electoral realignment has reversed the trend.
BYPASSING THE MUSLIM voter, the BJP made a virtue of creating and consolidating majorities by stitching together a broad, pro-poor alliance of farm communities that had gone underrepresented in the past, such as the EBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. The Modi government’s positioning of demonetisation as a drive against the venal rich fetched votes since it had enormous appeal among the rural poor. Through the surgical strikes against terrorists in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and pan-India nationalist appeals, the BJP was able to ideologically unite and consolidate its urban upper caste base with the rural poor. It created a message of hope, optimism and unity through promises of development and law and order.
Massive mandates carry the burden of great responsibilities. In the end, as the BJP’s UP president Keshav Prasad Maurya told india today: “Vikas and vishwas (development and trust) that the voters have for the BJP won the day.” The UP voter expects that a BJP government in both Lucknow and Delhi will help transform Uttar Pradesh into Uttam Pradesh (ideal state). For Modi’s party, the task of rebuilding the country’s most populous state has just begun.