The Hindu : Opinion/News Analysis : The battle for Uttar Pradesh

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Sunday, Apr 04, 2004

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Opinion - News Analysis

The battle for Uttar Pradesh

All the major formations are battling against uncertain odds in Uttar Pradesh but the BJP's stakes are the highest, says Venkitesh Ramakrishnan.

ALL THE outfits of the Sangh Parivar in Lucknow have been in hyper-activity mode for the past five days. What one gets to see is not the systematic and organised functioning that is normally associated with the activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-led Hindutva combine in the election season. It is a kind of frenzied movement aimed at personally reaching out to every single activist and supporter of the Parivar.

And the whole operation is directed towards one end — bringing people in large numbers to the joint rally to be addressed by the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, in the city on Monday, April 5.

Ordinarily, the Sangh Parivar does not have to take so much effort to fetch people to listen to Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani — its campaigning stalwarts. So what exactly has motivated this intense operation? According to activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who spoke to The Hindu on condition of anonymity, Mr. Vajpayee's Bahraich rally on March 28 is the immediate reason.

The rally, according to a middle-level party worker from Lucknow, was not exactly a flop — about 20,000 people were present. But it was also not the kind of resounding success that is expected of a rally attended by leaders of the stature of Mr. Vajpayee.

Given that the rally also presented the BJP's new Muslim face, Arif Mohammed Khan, and Bahraich is a constituency where the former Congress and BSP leader has some personal following, the crowd was not impressive.

Mr. Khan did bring in his supporters in sizeable numbers. However, the BJP's internal assessment is that its own supporters did not respond with the customary enthusiasm to the rally, the party worker said. And this had set the ball rolling for the frenzied run-up to the Lucknow show.

Whether this activity will have the desired effect remains to be seen. But the activists of the BJP, the RSS and other Sangh Parivar outfits admit that the Bahraich experience does not augur well for the party. This despite the hype about the `feel good factor' generated by the concerted campaign on the achievements gains of the National Democratic Alliance Government at the Centre and the unparalleled leadership of Mr. Vajpayee.

"If what happened in Bahraich is symptomatic of the larger situation in Uttar Pradesh, it will be an uphill task even retaining the 29 seats we won in 1999," says a senior State leader.

The apprehension is all the more because the BJP is no longer sure that multi-cornered political contests by themselves will help the party make significant electoral gains. Till 1998, it was confident that multi-cornered contests in Uttar Pradesh would automatically catapult the party to the top. But election results since then, particularly in 1999, have dramatically changed this perception.

In 1999, the State witnessed a four-cornered contest among the BJP-led NDA, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) combine. The NDA could come up with only 29 seats with the SP coming a close second with 26. The Congress got 10 seats and the BSP 14. This time too, the State is witnessing a four-cornered contest.

Central to the electoral reverses suffered by the BJP in 1999 was the shift in a segment of backward caste Lodh votes to the SP and the consolidation of Jat, Gujjar and Muslim votes in favour of the Congress-RLD combine in western Uttar Pradesh.

In the run-up to the coming elections, the BJP has neutralised the prospect of a repeat of a "Lodh vote shift" by bringing back the former Chief Minister, Kalyan Singh, into its fold. But there is a growing realisation that this will not be enough to stem the party's declining popularity.

Independent observers reiterate the same point. "The BJP has, over the last five years, systematically lost large segments of its traditional support base, particularly among the `upper' caste Thakur community," says I.B. Singh, an advocate.

An informal estimate after the 1999 Lok Sabha elections showed that over 65 per cent of the Thakur votes in the State had gone into the BJP-NDA kitty. But the BJP's repeated alliance with the BSP and the party's helplessness at the sidelining of the community by Mayawati depleted this support base.

The SP and its Thakur leader, Amar Singh, capitalised on this situation. The BJP leaders say that while they are yet to quantify the loss of Thakur votes, the response from the ground is not at all heartening. The depletion in the number of Thakur votes is expected to have an impact in all parts of the State, for the community is spread across with large concentrations in eastern and western Uttar Pradesh.

While there is no doubt that the SP stands to gain the most from the dent in the BJP's traditional support base, its leaders are also not sure how far they will be able to convert this into electoral gains. For the SP is also facing the threat of losing some of its conventional supporters, particularly those belonging to the Muslim community.

The SP's predicament rises from a perception among sections of the Muslim community that Mulayam Singh Yadav, president of the SP and Chief Minister, is going soft in his fight against the "communal politics" of the BJP. The SP leadership's refusal to state clearly that it will not ally with the NDA after the polls has not helped matters. So despite having a head-start in terms of organisational initiatives, weaning away sections of the BJP's supporters and forging an alliance with the RLD, the SP leaders are also keeping their fingers crossed. But there can be no denying that, at the moment, the party remains the frontrunner in the campaign front.

The Congress and the BSP, the other two forces, cannot claim to have made any gains out of the loss in the BJP's support base, though large sections of the minority community are inclined to support the Congress against the SP and the BSP.

But the problem that the minority community faces in rooting for the Congress is that, in a majority of seats, the party may not be able to attract enough non-Muslim votes to put up a decisive fight against the BJP.

The Congress think-tank in the State, consisting of leaders such as Salman Khurshid and Jagadambika Pal, are hopeful that the entry of Rahul Gandhi in the fray as the candidate in Amethi, and campaigning by Priyanka Vadra will help the party overcome this deficiency at least in a few constituencies in the Lucknow-Varanasi belt.

The persistent demand from several Muslim organisations that the leaders of the SP and the Congress form a joint front was motivated partly by the realisation that the Congress does not have enough votes to defeat the BJP, despite its principled opposition to the NDA at the national level.

That this demand has not produced any concrete result should propel minority voters to the SP and the BSP. And the BSP's hopes of improving its fortunes revolve around turning this tactical voting in its favour by boosting the polling percentage of the Dalit mass base. Clearly, all the major formations in Uttar Pradesh are battling against uncertain odds. The final picture will depend on how far each formation succeeds in overcoming its own specific problems. But the battle seems to be most crucial for the BJP, given its stakes in Uttar Pradesh in terms of retaining power at the Centre.

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