Voter’s silence may hold key in UP elections

The Uttar Pradesh election is characterised by anomalies. On the surface, the multi-phased poll seems “normal” and quiescent, the stillness broken by the roar of bigoted threats and rhetorical pomposity or the crowds gravitating towards a roadshow and occasionally by nasty exchanges between opponents. To be sure, the prelude was marked by a single note: There was no question that the BJP, which was elected to power in UP in 2017 and oversaw a controversial government, was on a high. The ‘impact’ of its much-touted double-engine growth, pushed by a party that ruled the Centre and the state, was perhaps more discernible in UP than say Jharkhand which was lost in 2019. The slew of sops and freebies, unrolled by Delhi and Lucknow, overlaid with Hindutva, ‘nationalism’ and the persona of a tough-as-nails chief minister, made for a re-run of 2017. The BJP prided itself on creating a new constituency, patronisingly called the labharthee (beneficiary) of the government’s purported munificence, although this tactic was borrowed from Indira Gandhi’s playbook. But who has the time or inclination to delve into history?

The election looks like winding down on a vastly different note. Elements of the dreaded ‘India Shining’ glitz that lit up the BJP’s 2004 electioneering are glimpsed periodically, undermining the double-barrelled effect of the labharthee project. The fear among Dalits and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) of their jobs being on the line if public sector units are privatised is so palpable that those who voted for the BJP in 2017 are rejecting it this time; and for the young Dalits, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), once an unquestioned choice, no longer seems that attractive. The Dalits and OBCs are afraid that privatisation would ring the death knell of their hard-fought right for statutory reservation in jobs. The issue of enforcing quotas in the private industry is flagged by the so-called champions of social justice but even the Samajwadi Party (SP) and BSP never pursued it vigorously; if anything, their leaders flaunt their proximity with the movers and shakers of India Inc.

The BSP maintained a low profile for the past five years and has not exactly re-emerged, guns blazing. Indeed, there are signs that the BJP and BSP would not be averse to striking a post-poll arrangement if circumstances demanded. Therefore, young Dalits veered towards the SP, calculating that it’s more important to unseat the BJP before taking a hard look at its core agenda. It’s a last-ditch effort because the Dalit-Yadav (the SP’s core voter) equation was always stressful.

Despite the unceasing attempts to dredge Hindutva from the underflow and place it on top, surprisingly it did not figure in conversations with Hindus, not even the Ram temple, unless they were prodded to speak. The most vocal proponents of the Hindu religion were Brahmins like those one met at Ghupa Pande ka Purva village (Isauli Assembly seat, Sultanpur district). The matters that most exercised others — notably inflation and the crop loss caused by the predatory cattle let loose because they can no longer be sold to the abattoirs — were validated in a religious context by the Brahmins. The cow is our “mother”, so an anti-cattle slaughter law had to come, never mind if the cattle plunder our fields; it’s a form of benediction. And which government has checked the price rise? Manmohan Singh’s?

The traders, wedded to the BJP and Jan Sangh for decades, were ostensibly not that enamoured of the party this time. Those traders who doubled as agriculturists in villages complained that the business losses suffered during the pandemic were not recompensed by their crops because much was devoured by the cattle. Business families looked like they were divided in their support for the BJP. The consistently low turn-out in the urban areas in each phase so far is attributed to the apathy of the better off segments towards the BJP. The refrain was, we don’t wish to vote for the BJP but we can’t go for another party either.

Like the Dalits, the OBCs were preoccupied with economic matters, uppermost on their minds being the security of their children’s future in a market-governed economy exemplified by the new pension scheme (NPS) adopted by the UP government. Under the NPS, the pension’s value depends on the corpus amount saved by the employee while retiring and is subject to a rise/fall in investment value. SP leader Akhilesh Yadav promised to restore the old scheme which fixed pension at 50 per cent of the last basic salary drawn along with other benefits and hikes. Akhilesh’s assurance might appeal to a section of the electorate comprising serving and superannuated employees but its symbolism was significant. It was an attempt to safeguard vulnerable persons against the vagaries of an unregulated economy.

However, the scales unquestionably tipped against the BJP only when the election schedule was announced. The departure of three important OBC legislators — Swami Prasad Maurya, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dharampal Saini — followed by their induction in the SP weakened the BJP’s big tent social engineering fabric that hoisted its Hindutva and “nationalist” ideologies to reinforce a sense of pan Hindu identity, and not of a caste-dissevered polity.

The trio’s walkout not only bolstered the message of statutory reservations being in jeopardy that got across the countryside but spurred a shift in the BJP’s OBC votes towards the SP. Akhilesh, whose SP rests on a Muslim-Yadav combination, might not have anticipated this trend. When he did, he put together a rainbow coalition of OBCs through tactical alliances because he himself never nurtured non-Yadav leaders unlike his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Doubtless, the BJP’s votive offerings of ‘ration-paani’ to the less well-off created a following in the rural areas. The ‘ration-paani’ was regarded as an insurance policy against hunger and deprivation during the pandemic. In hindsight, some of the recipients wondered if the benefits were outweighed by the pain inflicted by the price rise and agrarian distress.