The UP bypoll results have sent a message loud and clear to Opposition leaders. They need to revisit their election strategy and stitch up a mass connect
In an informal chat in April, the Samajwadi Party (SP) national president Akhilesh Yadav told this reporter that his party would win 350 seats in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh (UP) Assembly elections. “Anger is brewing among the masses against the Yogi Adityanath Government. They have made up their mind to oust the BJP Government in UP. We only need to channelise that anger to the polling booths and we will succeed,” he had said gleefully. Theoretically he might be right but politics is all about sending the correct message across. This requires political leaders to shun their air-conditioned comfort and slog it out in the heat and dust on the ground, shoulder-to-shoulder with party workers. What happened in the recently-concluded byelections in UP clearly shows Akhilesh’s disconnect with ground reality.
There is no doubt that people are angry with BJP Governments — both at the Centre and in the State — for various reasons, right from the poor law and order situation to the increase in economic woes. But the bypoll result shows that the BJP was able to placate that anger and convince voters that it was the only party which could work for the betterment of the masses. On the other hand, the Opposition failed to channelise that anger into votes.
The bypolls were necessitated by the deaths of sitting MLAs in Bulandshahr, Deoria, Malhani, Naugaon Sadat and Ghatampur. The Tundla seat fell vacant after its MLA, SP Singh Baghel, was elected to the Lok Sabha, while the Bangarmau seat in Unnao fell vacant after the conviction of BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in a rape case. The results show that the SP bagged just one seat, Malhani, out of the seven it contested, by a margin of just over 3,000 votes, while the BJP retained six seats. As per the Election Commission figures, the BJP got a vote share of 36.7 per cent, followed by 23.6 per cent by the SP, 19 per cent by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 7.5 per cent by the Congress and 11.4 per cent by others.
Seven is a miniscule number when you compare it with the total strength of the UP Assembly which stands at 403. But the number is enough to gauge the mood of the voters, particularly when the election was held in the backdrop of the Hathras incident where a Dalit girl was gang-raped and beaten up, leading to her death after a prolonged struggle for life in hospital. The incident raised a hue and cry across the country and was equated to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi. The Opposition even demanded imposition of President’s Rule in UP, saying the law and order situation in the State was at its nadir and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had lost the moral right to rule.
Besides, the Opposition built a narrative of the Thakur Chief Minister being anti-Brahmin after the incident in Kanpur Dehat where ganglord Vikas Dubey gunned down eight policemen and was later killed in a police encounter while in transit from Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh to Kanpur. The election in Deoria, in eastern UP, where all the parties had fielded Brahmin candidates, carried the tag of “a contest for Brahmin samman (pride).” It was said that a loss in Deoria would prove the anti-Brahmin credentials of the UP Government.
Then there was the socio-economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the reverse migration of labourers from the cities to their native villages in UP and Bihar. This, and the rise in prices of essential commodities in the recent past, also added to the woes of the ruling party. In this scenario, the BJP’s loss in the byelections would have lent credence to the Opposition’s allegations that the popularity of the saffron party was on the wane. But that did not occur.
So what happened? Many factors could have led to the victory of the BJP in the byelections. One of them could be the BSP entering the fray and forcing a four-cornered contest, fragmenting the negative vote. The BSP did not have anything to lose in this bypoll as the party had not won a single seat in these seven constituencies in the 2017 Assembly elections. At that time it got 23.62 per cent votes and this time, it got just about 19 per cent votes. Though there has been a dip in the percentage, by and large the party has been able to retain its core votebank of Dalits. In western UP, Muslims, too, voted in favour of Mayawati in patches despite her suicidal statement about a secret deal with the BJP to ensure the SP’s defeat in the UP Legislative Council elections.
But the biggest sufferer is the SP, despite clocking 23 per cent votes. Though it won Malhani in Jaunpur, it came second in the three seats of Naugaon Sadat (Amroha), Tundla (Firozabad) and Deoria. Shockingly, the party was pushed to third position in Bangarmau (Unnao) and fourth place in the Ghatampur (Kanpur) seat. Just a few days before polling, the SP had roped in former Congress MP from Unnao, Annu Tandon, but this failed to give the party an impetus in Bangarmau. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the SP had got 25.27 per cent votes in these six seats. So its voteshare declined by around two per cent in this bypoll.
The SP had left the seventh seat of Bulandshahr for its ally, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which could manage only 7,286 votes. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the party had got over 17,000 votes from this constituency but in the byelections, both the RLD and the SP failed to transfer their votes. The Congress, on the other hand, did comparatively better than the main Opposition parties like the SP and the BSP. The party contested six seats and got only 7.5 per cent votes but in three constituencies, the Congress did better than the SP. In Bangarmau and Ghatampur, it was in second position while in Bulandshahr it was in third place where the alliance partners RLD and SP came in fourth.
So the big question is if complacency cost the Opposition parties dear. The answer could be found in a comparison of the election strategy of the BJP with that of the Congress, the SP and the BSP. Aware that it was facing an anti-incumbency factor, the BJP did not leave anything to chance. In the saffron party, Yogi Adityanath took the lead and campaigned in all the seven constituencies. Eight Ministers were made in-charge of seven constituencies and other Ministers and senior party leaders were asked to carry out intensive election campaigns where they talked about the policies of the Central and State governments and how they had benefited the poor.
In comparison, Akhilesh and Mayawati did not address a single meeting, perhaps because they feared the Coronavirus outbreak. In Mayawati’s absence, Satish Chandra Mishra, who is the BSP’s Brahmin face, led the party’s campaign. In the grand old party, only State Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu addressed some meetings while senior leaders in Delhi “operated” through tweets and statements.
The style of campaigning of political parties reflects the seriousness of the leaders in the elections. Yogi led the campaign by addressing public meetings in all the Assembly constituencies. The narrative of the bypoll was very simple and Yogi only concentrated on the work his Government had done in the last three-and-a-half years. The election results have put a stamp of approval on the development-oriented approach of his Government.
The UP byelection results have sent a message loud and clear to the Opposition. Its constituents need to revisit their election strategy. Senior SP, BSP and Congress leaders need to come out of their comfort zone and toil with party workers in the field. This will not only invigorate their cadres but also make these leaders understand the ground realities. If they fail to redesign their strategy, it would be next to impossible for them to arrest the BJP’s surge in UP in the 2022 elections. The time is now, for them to learn some lessons in politics.
(The writer is Executive Director, News, Lucknow)