UP holds key to 2024 political narrative

Neerja Chowdhury

Senior political commentator

The BJP has the highest stake in the ongoing Assembly polls for obvious reasons. In power in four of these five states, it has to counter anti-incumbency and defend its performance of five years. How it fares in Uttar Pradesh will naturally set the tone for the 2024 General Election, which is of supreme importance to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Winning UP in 2017 (with a majority of 312 out of 403 seats) had created the momentum for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Even in 2014, had the BJP not managed to get 71 Lok Sabha seats in UP, it might have been heading a coalition government, and the political trajectory of Modi might have been very different.

But UP 2022 is really not just about winning the current election, which the BJP knows it has to do for a variety of reasons. Or about 2024!

The immediate fallout of the UP outcome will be on who sits in Rashtrapati Bhavan in July when Ram Nath Kovind’s term comes to an end. Losing UP, or barely scraping through can become dicey from the point of view of installing a person of BJP’s choice as President.

UP 2022 is also about Yogi Adityanath. All eyes are on him today and March 10 will determine the role he will come to play in the time to come. The two leaders to watch in this election are Yogi Adityanath and Arvind Kejriwal. Their future politics hinges a great deal on how their parties fare in UP and Punjab. For, both these leaders are positioning themselves for a post-Modi India.

Already there are whispers in the UP countryside that this is an election which will also decide the future prime minister, just as the 2012 state elections in Gujarat had set Modi on the path to Raisina Hill.

If the BJP does well again this time and wins a comfortable majority, it will be seen as a feather in Yogi’s cap. He will then begin to be viewed as a claimant for the Dilli gaddi at a future date.

There are sections within the RSS family who feel the next stage of the journey towards a Hindu Rashtra will be driven by the Hindu icon, saffron-robed Yogi Adityanath. Yogi has a cult following amongst a section of people, which is different from the following that Modi enjoys.

The hate speech by Yati Narsinghanand in Haridwar calling for eliminating Muslims and the statement by Karnataka BJP minister KS Eshwarappa that the “saffron flag may become the national flag in the future” are trial balloons. They are designed to test the waters, to see how they are received at the popular level.

Yogi is the poster boy of hard Hindutva and the party has used him in different states at poll time, in the process enabling him to acquire an all-India profile. While he has talked about his achievements in UP, such as improving law and order, he has unwaveringly articulated issues which will go to create Hindu-Muslim polarisation in the state and consolidate the Hindus to stand behind him. A five-time MP from Gorakhpur, this is the first time he is contesting in the Assembly polls.

As is well known, he renovated the Hindu religious sites at Varanasi, Mathura, Prayagraj and Chitrakoot. He is taking the credit for the Ram temple being built in Ayodhya. In January, he pitched the election as a fight between “80% versus 20%”, implying it was a battle between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority (though later he explained it away.) He said those dreaming about ‘Gazhwa-e-Hind’ would not succeed, that the country would be run by the Constitution and not the Shariat. And then he exhorted UP-wallas to vote for the BJP and not make a mistake which could convert UP into a “Kashmir, Bengal or Kerala”. It had these states — and others — up in arms and was clearly an allusion to “Muslim appeasement” which the UP chief minister continues to emphasise unfazed.

How much of this has actually worked on the ground this time remains to be seen. For Akhilesh Yadav and Jayant Chaudhary have been drawing enthusiastic crowds. Certainly in Western UP, where the famers have been on the warpath and the Jats have moved away from the BJP, many had said that they were “not going to be taken in by the Hindu-Muslim” rhetoric, as they had been after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots which had influenced the 2014, and indeed also the poll outcome in 2017. From all accounts, the first two phases of the poll held in West UP on February 10 and 14 have gone well for the SP-RLD combine. But there are five more to come.

If the BJP loses UP or just scrapes through, managing to cobble together a government with smaller parties, it will spell trouble for Yogi’s continuation as chief minister and his national ambitions. He may well be replaced by someone “more suitable” — possibly someone representing the lower OBCs — keeping in mind Modi’s plan for 2024. This category, the “Extremely Backward Castes” — they voted for Modi in sizeable numbers in 2017 and 2019 — have acquired an importance all their own, particularly after a dozen or so ministers and MLAs quit the BJP to join the SP, several of them EBCs.

So far, it has proved difficult for the BJP to curb Yogi. The BJP brass tried to rein him in by sending bureaucrat AK Sharma, who enjoyed the Prime Minister’s confidence, to UP. The idea was to make the government official-turned-MLC Deputy CM. But the plan came unstuck because Yogi would have none of it.

Many in UP are looking for a change today. The sentiment seems to be for the opposition alliance headed by Akhilesh Yadav.

But then elections today are not just about people’s sentiment alone. They are also about a machinery to manage the sentiment. And the BJP as we know has a massive, well oiled, resource-rich machinery at its command which can manage the “last mile” issues.

Of course, much will depend on whether this sentiment reflects a mere ‘dissatisfaction’ with the government or it is something stronger, an aakrosh (anger) which is harder to placate, and can have serious implications for the party — and for Yogi Adityanath’s future.  

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