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UP Polls: Despondency may not mean anti-incumbency
There are enough signs that there is widespread disenchantment with BJP, and a large number of their supporters are despondent.
Rampur Shakteshgarh village in Marihan assembly constituency of Mirzapur district is the back of the beyond in the literal sense of the term.
After crossing the bridge on the Ganga next to Chunar Fort, where Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was detained in 2020, it’s an hour’s drive through the Vindya foothills, a barren land with very few habitations. Rampur Shakteshgarh suffers from a drinking water crisis, but the small stream adjoining the village overflows the road during the monsoons, cutting off access. But, there is mobile network.
Binod, who gave only one name, belongs to the Kol community, a scheduled caste. He voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and will vote for the party in 2024 as well. “2024 is about national interest,” he said. “Because of (Narendra) Modiji, the nation has gained.” When asked to give an example, pat came the reply: look at how we are successfully evacuating our students from Ukraine, while bigger countries like the US and China aren’t being able to do so.
A fact check that American students do not go to study in Ukraine would not have made a difference to his belief.
If this was the entire story, and these were Lok Sabha elections, the ongoing elections would not even be a contest. But later in the conversation, Binod reiterates what has become a clichéd phrase in the UP polls: There is kante ki takkar (bitter fight) this time.
We will come to the reason Binod thinks there is a contest in a bit. Stone crushing used to be the main business in this area. During the Samajwadi Party (SP) government, even small leases were given for stone crushing.
Binod was a contractor and made ₹4-5 lakh a year. It was this money that made it possible for him to send his son to Kanpur to prepare for exams to get a government job and also enrol in a cricket coaching programme.
Under the BJP government, only large leases with bids running into at least a couple of crore are allowed. Binod is not the only one who has lost out. A lot of manual workers used to make ₹400-500 a day working in stone crushers. It was hard work, but the money was good.
Bigger players use machines for every step of the process and there is hardly any work available. Daily wages have crashed to ₹200-250 a day and it is difficult to find work. Wages for the rural jobs guarantee scheme are delayed.
The only other option is migration. To make things worse, while incomes have fallen, prices have increased. “We get ration, but you can’t just live on five kg of grain,” Binod sums up.
It’s these factors that make the Bahujan Samaj Party his choice in this election. “When the BSP was in power, we got roads in our settlements and pukka houses,” he remembers.
A comparison of the 2017 and 2012 results in Marihan underlines why voters like Binod could be important. The BJP had a vote share of 5.1% in this constituency in 2012, which increased to 44.7% in 2017.
People like Binod perhaps hold the key to the UP polls. They reneged on traditional partisanship to vote for the BJP in 2017. With their economic interest compromised, the new loyalty for the BJP is being tested this time.
The sentiment is more about going back to the fold rather than making sure that the party best placed to defeat the BJP — most agree it is the SP — sees a consolidation of votes.
For a lot of voters, however, the choice is not as simple as Binod’s. In Khanpur village in the Chunar assembly constituency in Mirzapur, a bunch of Brahmins sitting outside their home are critical of the BJP. Stray cattle are destroying their crops, the children are not getting any government jobs, prices have increased, and thanks to the free rations the government is distributing, they cannot find labour to work the fields, they say.
For Brahmins and most upper caste voters though, the BJP is the natural choice, and the SP a political nemesis of sorts. That the SP candidate in Chunar is not a Brahmin — or even the BJP candidate — has made the voting decision even more difficult for them.
At Tanda village in Chillupar constituency in Gorakhpur, however, Brahmins were more than willing to vote for SP candidate Vinay Shankar Tiwari, the son of Harishankar Tiwari, a musclemen of eastern UP who hails from the same village.
Tiwari was elected on a BSP ticket in 2017, but has defected to the SP. Even though the BJP has put up a Brahmin candidate, local kinship ties are more important than the ideological bond.
On the Azamgarh-Varanasi highway, Suresh Chandra Yadav runs a small eatery. The signboard describes him as a journalist. Back in 2017, even his wife and daughter-in-law voted for the BJP and they only divulged this information after voting, Yadav said. This time they are coming back to the SP, he said.
If this election is just about caste arithmetic, all it would take is a weighted average of the caste calculus to predict a ballpark estimate of the results. But not at all castes have been core voters of a political party in UP. It is among these groups that voting choices will be determined by more than social identity.
At Bachchhao in Rohaniya constituency on the outskirts of Varanasi, HT met two Rajbhar men belonging to the other backward class. Both of them voted for the BJP in 2017. However, their political loyalties seem divided this time.
This is exactly what makes the 2022 UP elections a difficult one to call. There are enough signs that there is widespread disenchantment with BJP, and a large number of their supporters are despondent. But the despondency within the BJP’s 2017 voters does not mean a consolidation behind the SP, something that would have resulted in significant anti-incumbency. A large number of individual and local unknowns will determine whether this distance can be traversed.
