Is it direct fight between Samajwadi Party and BJP?

UTTAR Pradesh is all set to vote in the first phase of its assembly polls. Analysts and politicians are speculating on whether the BJP is locked in a direct fight with the Samajwadi Party or facing a multi-cornered contest in the State. However, the party is trying to make it a direct fight. Is it not strange that the ruling BJP is preventing the division of opposition votes when the safest way to win elections has been to divide the Opposition votes?

However, it is not new for the Modi-Shah duo to go this way. He has done it in the West Bengal assembly elections. Many may disagree, but it is a fact that the BJP could accomplish an almost impossible task of eliminating both the Left Front and Congress from the political scene of the State. The result is fantastic for the BJP as only Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress and the BJP are sharing between them the political space of the State.

And posturing aside, Mamata Banerjee can hardly pose any challenge to Prime Minister Modi at the national level. In any case, the BJP was not the successor of the Left or Congress in the State. It was a carefully crafted strategy of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh to weaken the Congress and the Left at the State level only so that they could not challenge the BJP at the national level in 2024. In the State also, the party has captured the opposition space and can be seen to replace the Trinamool Congress in the long run as the ruling party.

A close look would reveal that the BJP and the supporting media have been constantly trying to project Akhilesh Yadav as the main opponent, despite the fact that he has been slow in reacting on important occasions when people were expecting him to stand against Yogi Adityanath's government. He never matched the alacrity with which Priyanka Gandhi responded to cases of atrocities and human rights violations. His presence was minimal in protest against the rape cases of Unnao and Hathras. In the former, a powerful BJP member was involved, and in the latter, upper-caste assailants raped and killed a Dalit girl in cold blood.

The question is whether Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah can do the same thing that they have done in West Bengal by turning a multi-cornered contest into a direct fight. This is not easy as, unlike West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh has States within the State. Here, the regional diversity is absolute and clear. Every region has its own history and culture. They speak different variants of Hindustani. Most of all, they have their own equations of castes and classes.

If western UP is dominated by Jats and Jatavs at the two extremes of the social spectrum, the eastern part of the State has Brahmins, Thakurs, and Baniyas at the top and various Dalit castes at the bottom. There are a large number of middle castes, including Yadava, Maurya, Kurmi, Rajbhars, Nishads, and others, between them.

With around 20 per cent of the population, the Muslim minority has become a common factor in all parts of the State. However, Aksihlesh's Samajwadi Party has tried to cover the entire State with alliances with parties that are dominating different regions. The SP is in an alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal of Jayant Chaudhary in western UP and with Ompraksh Rajbhar in eastern UP. These alliances have allowed us to manipulate the local level equations in a better way.

However, can the BJP or the SP eliminate the Bahujan Samaj Party from the contest? This is simply not possible. The BSP is the most organised party in the State. Its organisational network is better than even the BJP, which has the RSS' network at the grassroots to back it up. Its committed vote-bank of Dalits is unlikely to desert it. She is set to play a spoiler and will damage both the SP and the BJP.

Likewise, Congress too has committed supporters. In the last assembly elections, 6 per cent of voters polled for the party. In all likelihood, Congress will improve its performance after Priyanka Gandhi's continuous fight against the government. Her program of politically empowering women is sound, and it is having an impact, as she has given women 40 per cent of the tickets.

These circumstances hardly suggest a direct fight in the UP. And in a multi-cornered contest, BSP's gaining a few seats and Congress' improving its graph cannot be ruled out.

The BSP does not matter much in the equations of 2024, but Congress does. Any improvement in Congress' performance will adversely affect the BJP's prospects in 2024 at the national level.

Had the BJP been alert, it would have warded off the evil influences of the UP assembly elections on the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. The party has failed in doing so. On the contrary, Modi and Shah have laboriously turned the assembly elections into a referendum on the performances of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. This, in fact, is an outcome of their own narrative.

The metaphor of "double engine" automatically makes the Modi government a party to both achievements and failures in Uttar Pradesh. Prime Minister Modi could have easily avoided it. It was hardly necessary that Prime Minister Modi should be constantly claiming that the government at the center has been guiding the course of development in UP.

A measured approach, however, was needed on the part of the Prime Minister. He should have avoided the temptation of claiming credit for whatever development has been done in the State. This should have made it purely a State-level election without any chance of turning it into a referendum on the performance of the Modi government at the center along with the performance of the Yogi government. Maybe he could not do this for the reason that he represents Varanasi, one of the most important Lok Sabha constituencies in the State.