By Amitava Mukherjee
In Indian political vocabulary there is an oft repeated adage- the road to power in Delhi passes through Lucknow. As the 2019 parliamentary election approaches Indian political parties are realizing this. With 80 Lok Sabha seats in its kitty Uttar Pradesh(UP) will have a great say in deciding who would become the Prime Minister of India for the next five years.
With the Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP), the Samajwadi Party(SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal(RLD) striking an alliance in UP, several interesting possibilities have opened up. In the 2014 parliamentary election these three parties together had accounted for 42.7 percent votes of the state while the BJP had got 42.3 percent votes. So if these three parties can bring down the BJP on the mat this time several consequences may follow.
First, a below expectation result in UP will force not only the BJP but the National Democratic Alliance(NDA) it leads scurry for finding new allies to reach the 272 MPs mark, the magic figure for gaining absolute majority. In that case the BJP may have to change its parliamentary party leader because there is a distinct possibility that some of the new supporters may not accept Narendra Modi as prime minister. Rumour mill has it that the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangha(RSS) has its eyes on Nitin Gadkari as an alternative in such a scenario.
Secondly a fractured mandate will put great pressure on the BJP led state governments as well as on the Ram Mandir movement of the RSS and its fringe organizations.. But if the NDA wins handsomely then caste based political parties like the BSP, SP, JD(S) will come under severe strain. This is perhaps the reason behind Mulayam Singh Yadav�s shrewd assertion that he likes to see Narendra Modi becoming the prime minister again. In political circles this is interpreted as nothing but an attempt to please Modi.
The BSP-SP alliance is counting on the support of the Muslims-Yadavs- Dalit( MYD) bloc which together account for around 50 percent of the UP population- Mulims 19.2 pecent, Yadavs 9-10 percent and Dalits 21 percent. Ten parliamentary constituencies of the state have more than 60 percent MYD people. Thirty seven seats have 50-60 percent MYD population, So in these 47 parliamentary seats the BSP-SP alliiance has decisive advantage. In the rest 33 seats the MYD group forms 40-50 percent of the population, sufficient for a good clout. So it cannot be denied that the BSP-SP alliance is a winnable combination.
But there are chinks in the armoury of these two parties. Akhilesh Yadav, the president of the SP,enjoys undented holds on the Yadav population of Uttar Pradesh. But his influence on the Muslims of the state is not certainly as good as the one his father Mulayam Singh Yadav enjoyed. In the 2017 assembly election of Uttar Pradesh a large number of Muslim women are believed to have voted for the BJP candidates- the reason being BJP�s support for the abrogation of the triple talaq system.
Still the Samajwadi Party got 58 percent of the Muslim votes in the 2014 parliamentary election, a big jump from the 39 percent it received in the 2012 state assembly election. Now the Muslims� voting pattern will be watched with keen interests because the SP�s share in it must have plummeted in the 2017 assembly poll. If the Congress pulls away a good chunk of it then the Samajwadi Party�s performance may not be all that good in the next parliamentary poll.
Enters Mayawati, the BSP chief, in the picture with her Dalit vote bank and in the opinion of many political observers the setting becomes clearer. But the BJP, in its craftily designed concept of a Maha Hindutva, is now helped by a newly arising yearning among the dalits for economic emancipation rather than on caste based advantages doled out by governments. So UP will experience full scale operation of a Maha Hindutva scheme by the BJP which will try to unite upper castes,Dalits,Muslims and OBCs under one umbrella. This will be Mayawati�s tactics also. She has ben experimenting with it since the 2007 assembly election. But her Sarvajan experiment is a bit different from BJP�s Maha Hindutva in the sense that it has an economic content too like rural development,agriculture,, social and infrastructural development etc.
The alliance no doubt makes the prospects of the BSP and SP bright in Uttar Pradesh. In all probability the battle will be keenly contested because in recent times Mayawati�s hold on the Dalits is a shade different from what it had been earlier. Protesting against her growing closeness with the upper castes the Jatavs, numerically the biggest section among the Dalits, had deserted the BSP supremo before the 2012 assembly poll. Although they have again come back to Mayawati�s side yet some other Dalit sections like the Pasis, Khatiks and Valmikis have joined the BJP bandwagon protesting against overrepresentation of Jatavs in BSP structure.
Mathematical analyses show that the BJP led NDA is prone to do well in those constituencies where the Muslim-Yadav-Dalit population is less than 50 percent while the BSP-SP candidates are expected to win where the number of MYD people is more- between 50-60 percent or above. As per this calculation both the camps- the NDA on the one hand and the BSP-SP-RLD on the other are evenly poised
Possibly wins or losses will be decided by narrow margins.
( Amitava Mukherjee is a senior journalist and commentator)
