In Uttar Pradesh politics, few abbreviations have undergone as many political mutations as the three-letter PDA. What began as Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s creation for Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak has gradually acquired multiple meanings, interpretations and political avatars.
Its original political genes have been transformed beyond recognition several times in UP’s electoral laboratory, depending on the convenience of its political ‘pathologists’. At times, the PDA has displayed an almost octopus-like flexibility-changing shape, extending its tentacles towards newer social groups and adapting itself to the political requirements of the moment.
The formulation assumed considerable political significance in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections when Akhilesh Yadav sought to move the SP beyond its traditional Muslim-Yadav (MY) social base and build a broader social coalition of backward classes, Dalits and minorities. The electoral outcome gave the experiment considerable credibility to the BJP’s worries.
The SP emerged as the single-largest party in UP, winning 37 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, while the BJP’s tally dropped from 62 in 2019 to just 33 in 2024. The results ensured that the PDA could no longer be dismissed as an election slogan. On the contrary, it became a political reality the BJP had to take head-on.
The BJP’s subsequent emphasis on social engineering, particularly its social outreach to non-Yadav OBCs, Dalits and smaller caste-based groups, showed the importance attached to the social arithmetic exposed by the 2024 polls in UP.
{{/usCountry}}The BJP’s subsequent emphasis on social engineering, particularly its social outreach to non-Yadav OBCs, Dalits and smaller caste-based groups, showed the importance attached to the social arithmetic exposed by the 2024 polls in UP.
{{/usCountry}}But the curious part of the PDA story is that even its creator has never treated its genetic composition as immutable. Akhilesh Yadav has repeatedly expanded and reinterpreted the abbreviation to accommodate new constituencies as per his political expediency.
The original Pichhda-Dalit-Alpsankhyak formulation was subsequently broadened to include other sections, including “Agde” (forward castes), “Adivasis” (STs) and “Aadhi Abadi” (women). More recently, as the SP stepped its outreach to Brahmins, Yadav said the P in PDA also stood for Pandit.
The ruling BJP and its allies, meanwhile, have been busy conducting their own lab experiments with the original genes. Interestingly, within the BJP, one of the earliest alternative interpretations of the PDA in the current political discourse came from chief minister Yogi Adityanath who used to mean it “Private Development Authority”. His deputy chief ministers and other BJP leaders echoed this in and outside the House.
Only recently, urban development and energy minister AK Sharma, while appearing on a news channel, offered configuration of the Parivar Development Authority which according to him consisted of “Parivar, Darbari and Apradhi” (family, courtiers and criminals). “The rest have no place in this company,” he said, taking a swipe at Akhilesh’s political formulation.
BJP national general secretary Vinod Tawde, during his recent visit to Lucknow, provided a fresh permutation. For him, PDA stood for “Paraya Dhan Apna”, turning the SP social coalition into a political taunt.
BJP ally and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party chief Om Prakash Rajbhar has also supplied his own version. In his formulation, PDA becomes a reminder of the SP’s electoral record- “Pahelei haarei 2017 mei, Dobara haarei 2022 mei, Ab haarengei 2027 mei (It first lost in 2017, then in 2022 and will lose again in 2027).
Observers feel that the BJP and its allies may publicly be making light of the PDA by ridiculing and redefining it as per their convenience, but they feel compelled not to ignore it.
The competing versions are seen only as part of the larger fight for social ownership in the state. With the 2027 assembly elections approaching, the three-letter abbreviation is all set to gather more traction and possibly more versions.