The controversy stirred by the Allahabad High Court judgement directing the Uttar Pradesh government to hold urban local bodies’ election in a month without reservation of municipal wards for the Other Backward Classes has opened a window of opportunity for the Samajwadi Party to buttress its claim as the predominant political party representing the deprived sections of society.
SP state president Naresh Uttam said here on Wednesday that the party would organise “Aarakshan Bachao Yatra” across the state. He said the detailed plan of the yatra would be announced by party president Akhilesh Yadav.
Naresh Uttam said the party would take the issue of reservation for OBCs to every nook and corner of the state and expose the anti-OBCs face of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
“The BJP has dealt a severe blow to the caste-based identity politics of the SP. The BJP has beaten the SP consistently in last eight years during the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019 and two UP assembly elections in 2017 and 2019. The BJP has made significant inroads in the Backward Class vote bank of the SP. The High Court judgement has given an opportunity to the SP to fight back and paint the BJP as an anti-OBCs party and regain its lost ground,” said a political analyst.
Predictably, Akhilesh Yadav slammed the BJP and called the ruling party an “anti-reservation party”, alleging that the saffron party has “snatched” the reservation right from OBCs and will “do the same with Scheduled Castes (SCs)” in future.
“UP’s 60 per cent population had been deprived of reservation,” he said.
Senior SP leader Ram Gopal Yadav targeted the Yogi Adityanath government’s OBC ministers, questioning their “silence” on the issue.
In a tweet, Ram Gopal Yadav also took a dig at senior BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, charging that “Maurya ki sthiti bandhua majdoor jaisi!” (Maurya’s condition is like a bonded labourer). Maurya is the key OBC face in the BJP dispensation in the state.
Along with the attack by the opposition, the BJP also got a signal of unease from its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) which tweeted to say that the civic polls without OBC reservation were not appropriate. “We are studying the High Court’s order in this regard. If found necessary, Apna Dal (S) will knock on the door of the Supreme Court for the rights of the OBCs,” the party tweeted in Hindi.
“After this court order, the opposition has got an opportunity to do propaganda against the BJP by calling it anti-reservation. If they succeed it can cause major damage to BJP nationally ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The party and the state government will certainly come out with some strategy to control the situation,” a BJP leader said.
The BJP, in the last two decades, has made consistent efforts to make inroads among the OBC vote bank. The then BJP chief minister Rajnath Singh in 2001 had constituted the ‘Social Justice Committee’ for quota within quota for different castes of OBCs within the 27 per cent quota for the OBCs. The committee had estimated that the population of the OBCs was 43.13 per cent of the state’s population.
The BJP’s state president is a Jat , an OBC, but the party’s OBC candidate lost the Khatauli assembly seat in Muzaffarnagar to Rashtriya Lok Dal’s OBC nominee in the bypoll held earlier this month. For the last over two decades, the BJP has worked to build a base among non-Yadav OBCs to take on the SP’s formidable Yadav-Muslim combine.
In the 2017 assembly polls, the BJP had allied with the Apna Dal (S) and Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) to consolidate the Kurmi and Rajbhar votes. In the 2022 polls, when the SBSP joined hands with the SP, the BJP tied up with the NISHAD Party, which contested 10 seats and won six while the Apna Dal (S) won 12 of 17 seats it contested.
In the 2022 polls, the SP forged a rainbow coalition with the RLD and several smaller parties with bases among different OBC groups, which improved their prospects.
