Can Bihar be replicated in Uttar Pradesh? : The Tribune India

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Can Bihar be replicated in Uttar Pradesh?

THE forthcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections at the beginning of 2017 are quite crucial and critical for major political formations of the state like Mulayam Singh''s Samajwadi Party, Mayawati''s Bahujan Samaj Party and all-India parties like the Congress and the BJP.

Can Bihar be replicated in Uttar Pradesh?

UNITED WE WIN: The Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav joins hands with the RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar during a news conference to announce their merger in New Delhi. File photo PTI



CP Bhambri

THE forthcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections at the beginning of 2017 are quite crucial and critical for major political formations of the state like Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party, Mayawati's  Bahujan Samaj Party and all-India parties like the Congress and the BJP. The impact of the consequences of these elections will not only determine but also decide the future of the secular, plural and socially accommodative democracy in India.  

The major political competitors in Uttar Pradesh are aware of the fact that these elections are extremely significant for their political career and relevance. It is only the BJP and the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh that clearly understand the all-India significance of these elections for the consolidation of the idea of the Hindu rashtra, is the real goal of the RSS-led Sangh parivar and the BJP.  

A few facts may be mentioned.  First, the BJP has already become a big player in Uttar Pradesh politics when it won 71 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 elections. Not only this, but the BJP's percentage of votes in the Lok Sabha elections from Uttar Pradesh was 42.63 per cent, while local state political formations not only obtained quite a low percentage of votes like the Samajwadi Party (22.35 per cent) and Bahujan Samaj Party (19.77 per cent) only.  The BJP has already strengthened its base as compared to its local competitors like the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The Samajwadis won only five out of 80 seats and the BSP showed zero victory.  Secondly, the BJP has held many organisational meetings and mobilised many of its tall leaders to mobilise its supporters and sympathisers.   The BJP decided to hold the meeting of its national executive at Allahabad on June 12-13, this year. There, Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister, asked the people of Uttar Pradesh to end the 14-year-long exile of the BJP from the state in 2017.  Narendra Modi has claimed in every meeting in Uttar Pradesh that he is a “UP wallah” since he won the Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi and his first meeting in 2016 was in Saharanpur on May 26, 2016, an important place for Muslims becaue Darul Uloom Deoband is located here.  

It is not without reason that Narendra Modi decided to attend the Vijaya Dashmi celebrations in Lucknow, where the city was painted by the BJP depicting him as a "hero" of surgical operations of September 29. Further, Amit Shah, the BJP President, beginning June 2016, jumped in to organise the BJP election campaign when he held “booth-level meetings” of the BJP workers, including the committed RSS cadre. Shah has divided UP into six regions for election purposes by spreading the party's network in all 403 assembly constituencies.  

The organisation of the election campaign by a political party is an essential first step in the mobilisation of voters and supporters.   Second,  the BJP and the RSS-controlled Sangh parivar has activated it ideological political agenda of the targeting of Muslim religious minority through Bajrang Dal's  gau rakshaks and by taking up the issue of  “the slaughter of the holy cow and eating of beef” by the Muslims.  The BJP and all affiliated organisations of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have spread themselves throughout Uttar Pradesh — both for electoral mobilisation of the Hindus and for dividing society with a view to polarising it on religious and communal lines.    

The “surgical strikes” by the Army across the Line of Control on September 29 to avenge the killings of 19 Indian soldiers by Pakistanis has become the real “talking point” during the elections in Uttar Pradesh, with a view to convey the message to the voters that Bharat Mata is safe in the hands of BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Successful “surgical strikes” by the Army  under the leadership of Narendra Modi give the assurance that a lesson will be taught  to the enemies of Bharat Mata, that is to the Muslim Pakistan.  

The critical question here is: How are the two state-level political parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party and the all-India Congress Party strategising their campaign for the forthcoming UP Assembly elections in 2017? A related question is: “Can these three parties on their own and on the basis of their individual effort win the Assembly elections?”  The answer to the second question is in the negative.  

The ground reality in Uttar Pradesh and empirical data of electoral performance of these three political formations, beginning with 2014, clearly show that “none of these three parties, the SP, the BSP and the Congress on their own in multi-cornered elections win a sizeable number of seats in the assembly of  403 members.” 

 The social dialectics of Uttar Pradesh is quite complex and extremely contradictory.  If on the one hand, an average and ordinary inhabitant of Uttar Pradesh is highly aware about the happenings around, on the other hand, the whole society is  as if "frozen in history" of caste-based and religion-based identities and the residents of UP live and breathe caste or religious feelings.  

Hence, caste-based loyalties or communal-based politics have always determined the reality of UP politics even when the socially all-inclusive Congress party was winning the elections.   However, it is expected of political leadership to confront the fresh challenges by evolving new strategies to meet the emerging political situations.

Nitish Kumar, Laloo Prasad and the Congress in Bihar showed the way and defeated the BJP in  the 2015 state Assembly elections by forming an  “anti-BJP alliance”.  Will the Uttar Pradesh leaders like Mulayam, Akhilesh, Mayawati and the Congress leadership learn from the successful experience of Bihar and form an anti-BJP alliance? Or will they separately get defeated and allow the BJP and forces of Hindutva to march forward?

The intra-family feud within the Samajwadi Party when the elections are round the corner, irrespective of any patchwork resolution, has weakened every "member of the party".  Hence, it is a compelling reason for the internally divided Samajwadis to immediately make every effort to form an anti-BJP alliance with the Congress and the BSP and save Uttar Pradesh's secular social fabric. 

Fragmented politics provides space and openings to a monolith like the BJP and the Sangh parivar to vanquish opponents who are divided and fragmented.  Political leaders and parties have a choice either to form a limited "anti-BJP alliance" or sink by making elections multi-polar.  It is not the Jan Sangh or the RSS of the early 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or the 1990s.  Can the leaders in UP draw the correct lessons, move forward and save secular, plural and democratic India?

 The writer is  Professor Emeritus, Centre for Political Studies, JNU.

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