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Yogi’s sway key factor behind BJP’s sweep in UP mayor elections
The UP urban local body polls were used by all major political parties to experiment and test the mood of the urban voters before the 2024.
The Uttar Pradesh urban local body polls, the results of which were declared on Saturday – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the mayoral polls – were used by all major political parties to experiment and test the mood of the urban voters before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in which Uttar Pradesh with 80 seats is expected to play a key part.
For instance, chief minister Yogi Adityanath held 50 rallies in 13 days and his party, the BJP, experimented with the biggest batch of Muslim candidates to be ever fielded in any UP local election (395). Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav decided to join the civic poll campaign, something he hasn’t done before and his party did not name a single Yadav candidate for the mayoral contests. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) fielded an unusually high number of Muslim candidates for the same, 11 out of 17 for the mayoral polls.
For the BJP, the focus on Muslim candidates is actually part of a national outreach to ‘pasmandas’ or backward class Muslims. The majority of its 395 Muslim candidates were ‘pasmandas’. Most contested in places such as Qazipura in Ballia where the BJP had never contested before. About a 60 of them have won.
Also read | U.P. civic polls 2023: ‘Muslims changed voting trend, used discretion this time’
“In many places where we haven’t won, the candidates have come second. Now, with 2024 in sight, these candidates whose ‘MY’ (Modi-Yogi) narrative found favour with the masses, are going to be part of our campaign in the Lok Sabha polls. Since June 2022, you would have noticed how citadels of vote banks have fallen from Azamgarh to Rampur. So, in a way we have now found new campaigners in places where we hardly mattered before,” said Javed Malik, the BJP’s minority wing chief in west UP.
Malik was referring to the fact that along with urban local body polls, the results of two assembly by-polls to Suar seat in Rampur and Chhanbey seat in Mirzapur were also announced. Both were won by BJP ally Apna Dal (Sonelal).
In June 2022, the BJP won the Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha bypolls in these Muslim dominated constituencies, wresting the seats from the SP.
In December 2022, the BJP won for the first time the Rampur (Sadar) assembly seat that had been electing SP’s Muslim face Azam Khan or his family for decades. Now, the BJP ally’s win in Suar has its own meaning.
“It is clear that ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP will use its growing penetration in Rampur or the victories of about 60 (Muslim) candidates in local polls to make a case for itself among the country’s biggest and most influential minority group,” said Irshad Ilmi, a political expert.
Muslims account for almost a fifth of the state’s population, and most backed the SP in the 2022 state assembly elections. That is the reason why the BSP’s decision to field many Muslims in mayoral contests was seen by the SP as an attempt to scatter the minority vote to the BJP’s advantage.
“AIMIM (All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen), the party of Asaduddin Owaisi, whose candidate at one point was leading the mayoral contest in Meerut and eventually finished second ahead of the SP and BSP, too experimented in these urban local body polls,” said Ilmi.
“I have no doubt that this win sets the stage for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. To those who kept misleading Muslims all along, the results are an eye opener,” said deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya.
Phool Bano, the first Muslim woman to win the election to the Chilkana nagar panchayat chief’s post in Saharanpur on a BJP ticket, praised the new MY factor in the state.
The abbreviation has over the years meant the ‘Muslim-Yadav’ combine that SP founder the late Mulayam Singh Yadav put together to hold power. Since 2022, the BJP has used the same term to describe the Modi-Yogi factor.
“Musalmaan auraton ke liye Modi ji aur Yogi ji ne bahut kiya hai... ab dekhiye janta ka saath bhi mil raha hai. 2024 main dekhiyega … ab mahaul aur mizaaz donon badal raha hai (Modi-Yogi have done a lot for Muslim women and now the community has begun to realise this. Watch out for 2024. Now, the approach and attitude both are changing),” she said.
Adityanath campaigned in Saharanpur, Mau, Ballia, Azamgarh, Bulandshahr, Shamli – all seats with a substantial Muslim presence and from where the BJP’s Muslim candidates have won or done “reasonably” well.
“Yogiji addressed three to four rallies on an average. While our political opponents preferred to cool their heels in air-conditioned chambers, the chief minister’s campaign along with that of senior BJP leaders made a huge impact,” said UP BJP spokesman Manish Shukla.
After the results, which the BJP expectedly celebrated, and the Congress indicated that it was still putting things in order in the state, SP president Akhilesh Yadav and BSP chief Mayawati, both in differently worded statements, sought to question the BJP’s win. Mayawati even said that her party would have done better had the elections been conducted on open ballot.
According to the state election commission, along with sweeping all 17 mayoral posts, the BJP won 191 of 544 nagar panchayat chairman posts against the SP’s 78, the BSP’s 37 and the Congress’s 14 . The BJP won 813 of the 1,420 corporator seats against the SP’s 191 and the BSP’s 85. In the nagar palika parishads, the BJP won 89 of the 199 chairperson’s posts against the SP’s 35, the BSP’s 16, the RLD’s 7 and the Congress’s 4.
Out of the 5,327 seats of nagar palika parishad members, the BJP won 1,360, the SP 425, BSP 191, the Congress 191, RLD 40, AIMIM 33 and AAP 30.
Independent candidates also made an impression, winning in wards of SP veterans Ramgopal Yadav and Shivpal Yadav in Etawah.
Of the 7,177 nagar panchayat member seats, the BJP won 1,403, SP 485, BSP 215, Congress 77 and the RLD 38.
Despite its sweep, there were some points of concern for the BJP. While the Yogi factor helped, some of the ministers in his cabinet suffered an embarrassment. For instance, the SP won the nagar palika poll in Bareilly’s Aonla, the political turf of animal husbandry minister Dharampal Singh.
In Rae Bareli, represented by UP minister of state Dinesh Pratap Singh, the Congress won the election to the nagar palika chief’s poll. The BJP also lost in Tiloi, Amethi, the area of another minister of state Mayankeshwar Sharan Singh.
The BSP, which had two mayors in 2017, now doesn’t have any, indicating the party’s continuous slide in UP, where it has just a lone member in the state assembly at the moment.
