“Behenji [Mayawati] has asked us to stick to our Bahujan Samaj Party [BSP]. She has suggested that in case we find that the Samajwadi Party [S.P.] is ahead in the race we should vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP],” said Ranvir Jatav (55), a BSP cadre at Ibrahimpur village in Aligarh, the seat of Aligarh Muslim University, in western Uttar Pradesh.
Mukesh Kumar (25), an undergraduate youth at the village, countered him and said: “Cycle [the S.P.’s symbol] is ahead, and Akhilesh Yadav has promised employment. Why should I not vote for the cycle?” But Ranvir Jatav argued back: “It’s important to see our party’s interest. If Mayawati wins a substantial number of seats, she would dictate terms to the BJP in terms of Ministry formation and policies to suit Bahujan [Dalit] interests.”
This anecdotal account gathered from the field while touring the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh ahead of the election helps explain the swing of votes. The BSP’s vote share has plummeted from 22.2 per cent in 2017 to 12.88 per cent in 2022, an unusual phenomenon for a dominant Dalit outfit of the Hindi heartland.
The S.P.’s strategists had got a hint that this might happen from the fact that Mayawati was lying low, targeting the S.P. and soft-pedalling the BJP during the initial phases of the polling. However, journalists covering the election began decoding the “exchange” of appreciative words between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Mayawati in last two phases of the election. “Behenji’s strength has to be appreciated,” Amit Shah had said. Mayawati replied: “It is Amit Shah’s greatness [to appreciate our strength].”
Chief Minister Adityanath has retained power with almost the same vote share (from 39.67 per cent in 2017 to 41.29 per cent now) but reduced legislative strength: 255 against 312 in 2017.
Some political analysts argue that Hindutva of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP, its political arm, which borders on majoritarian politics, has subsumed caste metrics in Uttar Pradesh—the land of Ram Manohar Lohia and Kanshi Ram, who laid the foundations of backward class and Dalit movements in the post-Independence era. But this sounds too simplistic an explanation when one scrutinises how the dynamics of the various caste groups played out in the election.
S.P. president Akhilesh Yadav’s experiment of aligning with the Congress and the BSP in the 2017 Assembly election and the 2019 Lok Sabha election without doing the required groundwork at the grass-roots level failed. This time around, using this experience, Akhilesh Yadav gave suitable space to the smaller parties. He aligned with the Rastriya Lok Dal (RJD), the party with a strong base among the Jat farmers of western Uttar Pradesh; Om Prakash Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP), the party representing the Rajbhar or Bhar caste; Krishna Patel’s Apna Dal (Kamerawadi), which has a base among the Kurmi caste; and the Mahan Dal, the party of the Pasi Dalits in eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Awadh region.
Former Ministers in the Adityanath government, Swami Prasad Maurya, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dharam Singh Saini, who have a reasonable following among their castes of Kushwahas, Saini/Kashyaps and Nonias shifted to the S.P. from the BJP along with about a dozen MLAs after the Election Commission announced the elections in early January.
Akhilesh Yadav accommodated these leaders and parties for two broad reasons. The first reason is to rid the S.P. of its identity as the party of Yadavs and Muslims and broaden its base on the basis of Ram Manohar Lohia’s advocacy of “preferential treatment” to the marginalised castes. The second reason is to counter the RSS-BJP’s hidden agenda to dilute the policy of job reservations for OBCs and Dalits by privatising the public sector and outsourcing government jobs on a large scale. His promise that he would have the caste census conducted after coming to power was in pursuit of these goals.
After the results were declared, jubilant RSS-BJP supporters said that some journalists had misread the election: they had presented it as a tough contest when the BJP sailed through comfortably. It was, of course, a tough contest.
What helped the BJP? Two things certainly helped the BJP ride out the tough battle. First, the dole of rations financed by the Rs.56,000-crore budgetary allocation made on the eve of the elections and the direct cash transfer of Rs.6,000 in three instalments to 25 million beneficiaries through the government machinery. Secondly, the behind-the-scenes, meticulous transfer of the Jatav votes by Mayawati to the saffron party. The BJP has won the battle of Uttar Pradesh.