The Hindu : Few options beyond the SP-RLD combine here

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Friday, Apr 02, 2004

National

National - Elections 2004

Few options beyond the SP-RLD combine here

The return to power of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the new compulsions of western Uttar Pradesh's electoral politics have led Ajit Singh's RLD to ally with the Samajwadi Party, says Venkitesh Ramakrishnan.

"It's a kind of political homecoming for Nethaaji and this can only do good — for his party, western Uttar Pradesh and the State in general." Omvesh Prasada, a local leader of the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal from Bijnor district of western Uttar Pradesh is full of enthusiasm while saying this. The "Nethaaji" he is referring to is Mulayam Singh Yadav, Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party president.

Mr. Prasada is an old loyalist of the Lok Dal founder, Choudhary Charan Singh, and warmly remembers the late 1960s when the former Prime Minister virtually anointed Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav as his political heir. At that time, both the leaders used to work together in western Uttar Pradesh raising joint campaigns on the concerns and problems of the agricultural community. "That was a glorious time for the region because there were two powerful leaders highlighting our issues, but unluckily for us that association did not last long." "In all probability," says Mr. Prasada, "both the SP and [the] Lok Dal have realised their limitations now and have come together to play a long innings."

There are several farmers like Mr. Prasada in western Uttar Pradesh, who see a larger meaning in the political alliance that Ajit Singh, Charan Singh's son and RLD president, and Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav have struck. As his father had done, Mr. Ajit Singh also joined hands with Mr. Mulayam Singh in the 1980s. But ultimately the two went their own ways, seeking greater individual and political power. Obviously, both leaders have had a change of heart and there is no doubt that the primary motivation has been compulsions of electoral politics.

The RLD, which draws its strength mainly from western Uttar Pradesh had, in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in the last half-a-decade, alternatively aligned with the Congress and the BJP. Mr. Ajit Singh was with the Congress in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls and was with the BJP in the 2002 Assembly elections. The alliances did help the Dal as well as both the national parties to make political gains in this region. According to many RLD workers who spoke to this correspondent, two important factors propelled the RLD chief to the SP this time. One, Mr. Mulayam Singh's return to power and the backing he seems to be getting from various quarters, including powerful business and industrial groups. Two, the systematic depletion of the BJP vote bank in the region.

The repeated alliances that the BJP had with the Bahujan Samaj Party and the functioning of the coalition government of the two parties had alienated a large section of traditional BJP voters, particularly "upper castes" such as the Thakurs. The perception within the RLD is that the SP is bound to benefit from this reduction in the BJP vote base. The natural option, on the basis of this assessment, was to gravitate towards the SP.

The SP, on its part, had shied away from the RLD all these years basically because it had plans to cut into the RLD's agriculture sector-oriented political base and carve out a significant position for itself in the region. But the experience of the last decade proved that Mr. Ajit Singh was somehow carrying on with "Chaudhary Saab's" legacy, despite being rated as someone who did not have Charan Singh's charisma. The only section of the population that the SP attracted more or less consistently in almost all elections in 10 years was the Muslim community. But even that began to change after 1999.

In the last Lok Sabha elections, the SP lost its Muslim base almost entirely in the "Jat belt seats" such as Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Kairana and Saharanpur. An analysis of the 1998 and 1999 election results in some of these seats underlines this. The SP got 2,70,363 votes in Meerut in the 1998 elections. By 1999 its vote base had shrunk so much that its candidate polled only 13,050 votes. In Saharanpur too the party finished fourth, polling over one lakh votes fewer than it did in 1998.

This change was caused by a growing perception among Muslims of the region that in earlier elections the SP had derived its strength in western Uttar Pradesh only from the minorities, and that this by itself was insufficient to defeat the BJP. So, in the 1999 polls, the minorities increasingly backed the Congress (which was in alliance with the RLD), which drew support from among Jats, Gujjars and a section of Brahmins.

The alliance with the RLD should help the SP bring the minority community back to its fold, particularly because the combine can boast of having enough non-minority votes to attract the anti-BJP tactical voting of Muslims. Scores of Muslims who spoke to The Hindu in various parts of western Uttar Pradesh admitted that they would tilt more towards the new combine this time though they did have a `soft corner' for the Congress and its non-Hindu leadership represented by Sonia Gandhi.

The words of Ghulam Ali, a wayside food stall owner in Daula near Meerut, encapsulated the Muslim sentiment in the region. "We may have many preferences and may have doubts whether Mulayam and Ajit Singh will swing in favour of the NDA after the polls but the primary option offered by the situation on the ground is to vote in favour of the SP-RLD combine. We cannot afford [to] let our vote go waste."

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