How the BJP won UP
The politics of State effectiveness, delivery, fear, polarisation, organisation and micro-caste management came together to deliver Lucknow to the party again
“Har chunav mushkil hai. Loktantra hai, virodhi ko bhi vote milenge. Par jeetenge hum. (Every election is difficult, it is a democracy, our opponents will get votes too, but we will win),” a top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, closely involved with elections in Uttar Pradesh said back in September as poll preparations began in India’s most politically crucial state.
In the past six months, what was on display was indeed democratic competition in action; what was on display was a mass movement in the form of the farmers’ agitation and the residual impact of the movement in the western part of the state; and what was on display was the visible increase in the support base of the Samajwadi Party and its allies (as seen in the increase in SP’s vote share and seat tally compared to 2017). But the leader’s prognosis turned out to be fundamentally correct. At the end of the day, or actually by the middle of the day, on March 10, it was the BJP that comfortably returned to power in Lucknow.
What gave the BJP the confidence it would succeed? And how indeed, did it succeed? The answer lies in the politics of State effectiveness, the politics of welfare delivery, the politics of polarisation, the politics of fear, the politics of organisation, and the politics of micro-caste management.
One, given the overwhelming focus on identity, the politics of performance legitimacy and State effectiveness is often underestimated when it comes to analysing UP’s polls. To be sure, there was the failure of the UP government when it came to managing the second wave of Covid-19 and there were also clear governance deficits as seen in the case of high-profile cases such as Hathras or Unnao or Lakhimpur Kheri. But in UP, a key metric on which voters judge governments is the ability of the State to maintain order. This is a geography that has seen communal riots, caste conflicts, everyday cases of violence and high-handedness, and selective access to institutions of the law depending on the party in power. This is what Yogi Adityanath, from Day 1 in office, sought to correct.
While law and order are often clubbed together as a single category, there are in fact separate – and the UP government preferred to impose order, even if it came at the cost of the rule of law, as seen in the implicit and sometimes explicit directions to go after “criminals” without subjecting them to the due process of law. But this strategy had popular appeal. The fact that “criminals” were projected as belonging to select communities lent it a political and communal subtext – but this, too, had widespread popular sanction. It was democratic illiberalism in action when it came to enforcing the State’s writ. But this strategy was supplemented with the law-and-order machine being partially insulated from political pressures. The thana incharge was not answerable, as under the SP regime, to every party supporter on the ground but to the district headquarters; the Superintendent of Police in the district was not answerable to every legislator, but to the director general of police and the CM. Together, all these strategies led to a perception in the improvement of order, a reduction in everyday crime, and an enhancement of public safety in both urban and rural areas, for both men and women. It also made Adityanath come across as a “strong leader”, and is perhaps the single biggest factor in the BJP’s return to power.
Two, the politics of delivery helped. Like in the rest of the country, there remains a severe unemployment crisis in UP – which anecdotal reports from the ground captured in the election. There remains deep and growing inequality – which has been exacerbated by the pandemic. But the BJP has relied on two strategies to offset this economic distress. The first is welfare spending; the free ration scheme during the pandemic was a clear vote-winner, just like the distribution of gas cylinders in 2017 was, and ensured that the more marginalised segments of society remained with the party in power. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s repeated references to it during his campaign speeches did not go unnoticed, and coupled with a sharp organisational focus on identifying beneficiaries, one family at a time, and reaching out to them to remind them of what the government had done, helped amplify the message. The second strategy to showcase governance in times of economic distress is amplifying the focus on public projects, particularly infrastructure – from highways to village roads, from electricity to bridge construction. Given how each project is appropriated by leaders at the local, state, and national level, as somehow their own personal achievement, it lends a high degree of visibility to the party in power.
But the politics of effectiveness and delivery was coupled with the politics of fear – and in UP’s case, the fear that the BJP tapped was of SP’s return. The more reports suggested that this was a close election, the more the sense that Akhilesh Yadav could actually return to power, the greater the fear that this would mark a return to “Yadav-domination” and the easier it became to mobilise the BJP’s own constituencies to turn up at the polling booth. This has strong echoes of the Bihar election of 2020, when the possible return of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the lawlessness associated with it in public memory galvanised supporters of the National Democratic Alliance to vote in larger numbers. The SP tried to expand its base, but three decades of being associated with one community, and perceptions of that community’s domination in public affairs, is hard to shed in one election.
The politics of polarisation constituted a subtext to this politics of fear. Over the past five years, the Hindu electoral majority that catapulted the BJP to power has turned into a sharp, almost exclusive, Hindutva orientation of political structures, in law, in public policy. The ruling party did not have a single elected Muslim legislator in the assembly; laws such as one governing interfaith marriages were passed and policies that cracked down cow slaughter were enforced in ways that seemed to target minorities; the Ram Temple in Ayodhya was a State project; and there was a general sense that Muslims, after having enjoyed a political veto in state during the SP’s rule, had been “shown their place”. The effort to project the election as an “80-20” contest, or to portray rival as catering only to minorities, struck a chord.
But the politics of performance and the politics of fear could only succeed due to the politics of micromanagement, both in the realm of identity and in the realm of organisation. In terms of identity, the BJP has largely succeeded in maintaining its vast social coalition – of upper castes (Brahmins stayed with the party despite allegations of a perceived Thakur tilt), of other backward class communities (some moved away, which explains the SP’s vote share, but the majority did not), and of Dalits (where the implosion in the Bahujan Samaj Party continued to help the BJP). In terms of organisation, the party’s leaders, including its effective state in-charges ensured that the party organisation remained disciplined and well-resourced, mediated disputes, pushed out the party’s messaging, and mobilised workers to ensure the BJP’s voters turned out on polling day in all phases.
The BJP’s organisational, political, and governance structures came together yet again in UP, showcasing why it remains the most formidable election machine in India’s history.