Amidst defections in UP, Hindutva and discontent
If Yogi Adityanath manages to win Uttar Pradesh for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) he will create history
If Yogi Adityanath manages to win Uttar Pradesh for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) he will create history. No chief minister has completed a full five-year term in India’s largest state and managed to be re-elected. The victory, if it comes, will catapult Adityanath’s political stature to a higher level. In order to manage this feat, Adityanath wants to make this an “80% versus 20%” election. This not so subtle effort to seek a consolidation in the Hindu vote – Hindus and Muslims have a roughly 80-20 ratio in Uttar Pradesh’s population – is more hyperbole than serious strategy. No party gets a 80% vote share in an election in India.
But is over confidence about the possibility of a Hindu consolidation damaging the party’s carefully crafted social coalition in the state? A series of defections of OBC leaders from the BJP over the past days (including that of three ministers) have made this question worth examining.
The BJP’s winning formula in Uttar Pradesh is 60-40 , not 80-20
The BJP’s massive victory in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections led to something which was believed to be impossible by many people: an alliance of regional heavyweights Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The SP-BSP alliance seemed to be very strong on paper. Even in the 2017 elections, when the BJP won a three-fourths majority in the state, these two parties had a 44% vote share which was greater than the BJP’s 40% . However, when the results were announced in May 2019, the BJP shocked both the SP and the BSP by wining 62 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state (its ally won another two) with a vote share of 50%. The combined vote share of the SP and BSP actually went down to 37.5%. How did the BJP achieve this victory? It consolidated the support of everyone other than the core social base of the SP and BSP -- Yadavs, Jatavs and Muslims, who together have a combined share of around 40% in the state’s population. Post-poll data from the National Election Study 2019 by CSDS-Lokniti shows this clearly.
To be sure, the 2019 strategy of the BJP had proved successful earlier as well. A 2017 pre-election report in HT (https://bit.ly/3qpv141) by Prashant Jha spoke in detail of the BJP’s electoral strategy. “The strategy was to focus on the upper castes, non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits, who comprise 55-60% of its population. (Sunil) Bansal had to implement this on the ground, and change the party’s character in the process, by appointing OBC district chiefs and picking up a large share of candidates from this segment of the society”, it said. The party was confident of this strategy yielding results. “As much as 83% of the upper castes, 17% Yadavs, 73% non-Yadav OBCs, 25% Jatavs and 50% non-Jatavs are voting for us.”, the story quoted a BJP official as saying.
The recent defections can weaken the BJP’s non-Yadav OBC base and upset the 60% calculation
13 BJP MLAs including three ministers from the Adityanath cabinet have resigned from the BJP in UP recently. There is a common refrain in the resignation letters of most of these leaders: the BJP being insensitive to the concerns of the socially disadvantaged OBCs and Scheduled Castes (SC). Of the 13 MLAs who quit the BJP until January 13, nine are OBCs, according to database compiled by the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University. Interestingly, all OBCs who have quit the BJP are from the ranks of non-Yadav OBCs, a crucial support base of the party. Even though some of these defectors -- many of them are actually turncoats who joined the BJP before 2017 -- have not joined the SP formally , Akhilesh Yadav has been forthcoming in welcoming them to the party’s fold.
These defections seem to suggest that the SP is trying to make a dent in the BJP’s non-Yadav OBC support base. In November last year, Yadav promised that if the SP is voted to power, his government would carry out a caste census and offer benefits proportionate to population share of each sub-caste (https://bit.ly/33xpcIM). This announcement was a direct attempt by the SP to pre-empt the appeal of the BJP’s plans to sub-stratify OBC reservations through the Justice Rohini Commission, even at the cost of putting a potential squeeze on the benefits to Yadavs, the core voter base of the SP.
The Yogi and his schism
The BJP did not fight the 2017 assembly elections in UP with Yogi Adityanath as its chief ministerial candidate. In fact, his name was announced seven days after the BJP won by a landslide. According to a post-poll survey by CSDS-Lokniti , Yogi Adityanath did not have a very high popularity as the chief minister’s choice in the state. While the survey reported a vote share of 40.1% for the BJP, only 7.4% of the respondents named Yogi Adityanath as their preferred chief minister candidate. To be sure, Yogi had the highest popularity among BJP leaders for the job.
What would be more worrying for the BJP is the fact that even in 2019, when the BJP prevailed against a strong pre-poll alliance of the SP-BSP, it was Narendra Modi’s popularity which saw the BJP through.
“Caste aside, the survey also indicates that had it not been for the popularity of Narendra Modi, who was the prime ministerial preference of 47% of the respondents, the BJP may not have been able to win the number of seats that it did in the State”, a report published in The Hindu based on the CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey for 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh said. “The survey found the BJP-led State government to be fast losing popularity. When respondents were asked to indicate their chief ministerial preference in the event of a snap election in the State, 28% took SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s name and 27% took the name of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath”, it added.
While the BJP likes to portray Yogi Adityanath as a pan-Hindu leader, his caste identity of a Thakur – they are a dominant upper caste in the state – is not insignificant. The defection of OBC leaders and their joining hands with the SP citing an anti-OBC-Dalit bias on part of the BJP underlines the upper caste identity of the BJP’s chief minister in the state.
None of this should be used to write-off the BJP’s prospects
While these defections and a possible desertion of the non-Yadav OBC vote bank is a matter of concern for the BJP, it does not mean that the party can be written off in the forthcoming elections. When it comes to the question of representation, the BJP will probably still have an advantage at giving a greater representation to Hindus including non-Yadav OBCs among its candidates than the SP. This is because unlike the SP, the BJP does not have to worry about fielding Muslims on its ticket (see https://bit.ly/337Qgi0 for details), which means it has greater elbow room to accommodate all social classes among Hindus. This could help the BJP in damage control. But a significant exodus of OBC voters may create problems for Yogi Adityanath even in the event of a BJP victory.
