HT has extensively reported on these elections, both in terms of analysis that looked to underline the contours of this crucial election and multiple pieces from the ground that shone light on the most important questions that will decide voting patterns and behaviour.
March 7 brought down the curtains on assembly elections in India’s most populous and politically significant state after seven exhausting phases. The die is now cast, and only on counting day on March 10, will emerge answers to questions on Uttar Pradesh’s and India’s political future. For the past three months, HT has extensively reported on these elections, both in terms of analysis that looked to underline the contours of this crucial election and multiple pieces from the ground that shone light on the most important questions that will decide voting patterns and behaviour.
UP election: A policeman stands guard outside a polling booth during the last phase of assembly election in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, on March 7 (REUTERS)
In a column, “Keeping up with UP”, that began as early as December, Sunita Aron provided a frame for reference for elections in a state that has been a nursery for both religion and caste, and provided a history lesson on how the BJP achieved its 2017, and 2019 dominance. She also wrote about the Samajwadi Party’s attempts to puncture the BJP’s mandir politics, by caste driven social engineering, making the BJP’s reluctance to commit to a caste census a central part of their early campaign.
The one firm consensus that seems to have emerged was that this is a bipolar election between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. But for the SP to become a serious contender it had to correct one of the most obvious flaws of its doomed 2017 campaign; the fissures within the Akhilesh Yadav family. HT examined how the Yadavs have buried the hatchet and come together and Prashant Jha delved into the differences between the personalities and the challenges before Akhilesh Singh Yadav and his father, former Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav.
For the most part, one of the primary reasons for the bipolarity that has emerged in the elections has been the reduction of the BSP from a party that formed government 15 years ago, to a party that can scarcely hope to win on its own strength. Sunita Aron sought to explain the silence of Mayawati and Prashant Jha outlined the reasons for the political decline of a leader that made an audacious play for the Prime Minister’s post in 2009, to an also-ran in her own state in 2022.
Still, in Uttar Pradesh’s many complexities, there is the question of whether the Dalit vote, carefully nurtured by the BSP, is holding strong, and the extent of its evaporation. In a report from Agra, known as India’s Dalit capital, Hemendra Chaturvedi and Dipankar Ghose reported that many from the scheduled castes still favoured the BSP. How many votes the BSP garners and the seats that they win may well influence the final outcome. No wonder then, that towards the end of the election cycle, there seemed to be an outreach from the BJP towards the BSP.
The seven-phase elections began from Western Uttar Pradesh, and quickly it became apparent that apart from pushing the broad Hindu coalition built so assiduously over the past five years, the BJP’s prime election pitch was an improvement in “law and order”. From the ground, Smriti Kak Ramachandran reported that this did have resonance as an issue.
Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore encapsulated the factors that define an election in west UP, including relative urbanisation, a high Muslim population and farmer anger over the three now-repealed farm laws. One of the central questions in Western Uttar Pradesh was which way the Jat farmers, enraged by the government’s stance on the farm laws, but carrying the baggage of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots will vote. In the once violence-torn district of Muzaffarnagar, Dipankar Ghose found that the internal struggle between farmer and Hindu is not easy, and the answer may well define the electoral fate of the area.
If the resonance of the farm laws seem to decrease as the elections moved eastward in Uttar Pradesh, one common farmer grouse that stayed constant was the issue of stray cattle destroying crops and livelihood, captured in this piece here.
But as the elections shifted eastward, the effect and influence of the SP's imports such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Om Prakash Rajbhar were put to the test. The SP is banking on these leaders to break into the social coalition the BJP built, but have been met with stern resistance in terms of a wide ration web given to the poorest during the pandemic. The BJP has its own allies in the Nishad Party and the Anupriya Patel led Apna Dal (Sonelal), representing the Kurmis. This piece from Mirzapur, where Phoolan Devi won two parliamentary elections in the constituency backed by the Mallahs (Nishad), described why caste is still important, but also why overcoming the BJPs’ immense margins of victory in 2017 and 2019 may yet be a problem.
Eastern UP is home to Varanasi, the newly refurbished Kashi Vishwanath corridor, and the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Varanasi, then, Smriti Kak Ramachandran found a city that has seen development, and hopes for more, despite a few notes of dissent. Among the issues that those critical of the incumbent BJP government voiced loudest is unemployment and the lack of recruitment in government jobs, leading to anxiety among the youth, explored by Roshan Kishore here.
By late February, in this opinion piece here, senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai made an early call, giving BJP a clear edge. Roshan Kishore, in this piece from eastern UP, asked if despondency translates into a tangible anti-incumbency. Finally, in a perceptive opinion piece, Rahul Verma wrote on why a “wave” is difficult to ascertain when an election is still in progress. Whether there is a wave or not, exit polls notwithstanding is a question that can be answered on Thursday.
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