Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Will east and west UP bury differences to find common ground in 2019 polls?
Traditionally, eastern and western Uttar Pradesh have been vastly different in terms of their political temperaments, demography and the economy. As the two regions prepare for the April-May general elections, local factors will again play a key role in how they vote, forcing political parties to customise their campaigns in the two regions.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Ram temple movement started gathering momentum, religion had become the leitmotif of politics in eastern Uttar Pradesh. People from the region travelled in droves to Ayodhya, the epicentre of the temple movement, to pay homage at what Hindus believe is the birthplace of the warrior-god Ram. What was remarkable was that despite being home to a sizeable Muslim population, the region wasn’t religiously polarised.
The impact of the temple movement, and communal polarisation that ensued, was greater in western UP. First came the 1987 communal violence in Meerut’s Maliyana that left an estimated 350 people dead. The communal feelings that kept simmering beneath the surface exploded again in 2013 in Muzaffarnagar, claiming more than 60 lives. The warring sides were Jats and Muslims.
Eastern Uttar Pradesh, in contrast, was calm.
Traditionally, eastern and western Uttar Pradesh have been vastly different in terms of their political temperaments, demography and the economy. The success of the Green Revolution in the region in the 1960s brought prosperity to western Uttar Pradesh, where the land, too, is more fertile and land holdings are larger than in the east.
As the two regions prepare for the April-May general elections, local factors will again play a key role in how they vote, forcing political parties to customise their campaigns in the two regions.
The three Cs — cane, caste and communal polarisation — will decide which way the electoral wind blows in the west. In the east, caste, personality and national issues will be
key.
To be sure, if there’s one common theme, it’s that of national security, which is at the core of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack and the February 26 air strike on a terrorist camp in Pakistan’s Balakot by the Indian Air Force.
Every party in the elections has its pockets of influence in the west. If Agra is called Bhim Nagari (after Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar) because of the concentration of Dalits, the main support base of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP),the Samajwadi Party’s Yadav and Muslim vote bank is also spread across the western belt. Even Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal has influence in Jat-dominated Meerut and Baghpat.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Manoj ji (that’s how he is known), from the Saharanpur division, said: “National interest and decisive leadership are the two prime poll issues in 2019. As for the temple, we have decided to do 13 crore ‘jaaps’ (chanting of mantras) on April 6, 2019.”
April 6 marks the start of the Hindu festival of Navratri.
The Green Revolution brought prosperity to the west. Most politicians in the region tend to come from the farming community, and their issues have traditionally dominated electoral politics. Former prime minister, the late Jat leader Chaudhary Charan Singh, not only brought farmers’ issues to the forefront of electoral politics but also united the
different castes using the
issues.
His son and grandson, Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary, have followed the legacy, focusing their electoral politics on farmers’ issues, besides caste. The consolidation of so-called backward classes started in western UP much before the issue of caste-based quotas in government jobs and educational
institutions flared in the late 1980s.
According to Jagat Singh, a farmer in Meerut, who has observed the politics of the state since the days of Charan Singh, sugarcane is the lifeblood of the region. In the words of farmers’ leader Choudhury Diwakar, the 5.3 million sugarecane growers of the region influence the outcome of elections, from the local ward level to the Lok Sabha.
The scenario started changing in the 1990s, when western UP it became a lab for the BJP to reinforce its Ram temple campaign. The BSP’s Dalit movement, too, struck a chord first in the west. BSP leader Mayawati won her first Lok Sabha election from the region’s Bijnore in 1989.
Dalit activist Satish Prakash says, “Dalits are economically and socially strong in west UP, which has now become a centre of the Dalit movement.”
While the BSP is aspiring for Dalit-Muslim unity to sail through the choppy waters of western UP, its alliance partner SP is eyeing Yadav-Muslim consolidation in the Yadav belt. Demographically, the Dalits, especially the Jatavs (Mayawati’s caste) and Jats, and Muslims, dominate the region although Yadavs, Gujjars and Vaishyas make up sizeable numbers.
It was in 2014 that chief minister Yogi Adityanath was first deployed in western UP for campaigning. Prior to that, Adityanath had concentrated on Purvanchal. His Hindutva politics paid dividends as the BJP won 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, and came to power in the state in 2017.
Diwaker says the electoral outcome this time around would depend on the candidates fielded by the SP-BSP alliance as well as the Congress.
“It will be advantage BJP if Congress fields strong candidates (to cut into the votes of the alliance). However, the election in many of the constituencies will be on Hindu-Muslim lines though the candidate’s caste would also decide the behaviour of voters,” he added.
As for the Muslims, their first preference is the SP, the second is the candidate most capable of defeating the BJP and the third a Muslim.
In such a scenario, the Congress will have to push hard to make its mark in the region. Neither the caste factor nor the communal polarisation is going to help the party that had won three seats in the west, 10 in central UP, one in Bundelkhand and seven in the east in the 2009 polls, when its tally of 21 was its best performance in UP since the early 1990s.
Eastern UP has sent six prime ministers to the Lok Sabha — Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar and Narendra Modi — but remains the most backward region of the state.
Somehow, it hasn’t been able to reap its share of the dividend of economic development and punches below its weight when it comes to influencing electoral outcomes.
Anjana Prakash, who was in the past associated with the SP and the Poorvanchal Banao
Samiti, said: “Though it is the most backward area of UP, people largely vote for national issues, personality and their ideology. Caste remains the main ingredient in electoral politics across UP.”
Interestingly it is the East that has the maximum number of political heavyweights in the fray —Prime Minister Narendra Modi ( Varanasi), Congress president Rahul Gandhi (Amethi), United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and former UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav (Azamgarh) are among the candidates fighting for election to the Lok Sabha from the region.
Demographically, the area is dominated by upper castes and backward classes with Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits having a say in small pockets. Farmers, with small land holdings, have little say in the electoral politics of the region. That is why their issues hardly figure in elections.
Vinod Chand Dubey of Allahabad, who hails from western UP and worked closely with socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia and later SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, said: ‘While the politics of dharnas (sit-ins) and demonstrations run in the east, the west, which has a large farming community, avoids brawls. They are development-oriented.”
Political expert KC Rana, from Agra, recalls how a demonstration call given by Charan Singh to protest the infamous Maya Tyagi rape case (1980) of Baghpat had drawn bigger participation from the east than the west.
Partly because of the increasing penetration of mobile handsets in rural areas, some sections of the eastern and western regions of Uttar Pradesh have started voting uniformly, as was visible in the elections of 2012, 2014 and 2017. Since the 2014 polls, social media has been a major tool of campaigning in elections.
Before the 2012 assembly polls, the mufti of Muzaffarnagar Zulfiqar Ali had said lyrically, “Jo hawa purab ke kheton khaliyanon se chali hai wo ab ganne ke kheton tak pahunch gayi hai” (The wind that started blowing from the agricultural fields of the east has now reached the cane fields of western UP.)
What will happen this time around? Will the east and west find common factors to unite on electorally? Experts say it happens only when the elections are swept by a 2014 or 2017-like political wave in favour of the BJP. Otherwise, while the west will vote on communal lines and on farmers’ issues, personalities and castes will hold sway in the
east.
What could blur the divide is nationalism, if it continues to dominate the political narrative until the voter steps into the polling booth.