BJP's clean sweep in UP

The unexpected has happened in Uttar Pradesh. Riding high on Modi wave, the Bharatiya Janata Party has swept this politically sensitive state reducing Congress and Samajwadi Party to single digits and decimating Bahujan Samaj Party and Rashtriya lok Dal as they failed to open their accounts.

The BP won 71 lok Sabha seats with a vote share of 42 per cent. This is 25 per cent more than that of 2009 election, when the BJP had won just 10 seats. BJP’s partner Apna Dal won two seats, taking the NDA tally in UP to 73. This is the best ever performance of the BJP – better than that of 1998 when the BJP won 57 seats of the 85 lok Sabha seats in the undivided Uttar Pradesh.

This is indeed surprising as now in Uttar Pradesh the BJP has only 47 legislators but 71 members of Parliament. The BJP’s tally in UP is much more than the combined figure of Congress at the national level. The Samajwadi Party and Congress have won five and two seats respectively, and incidentally, these seven seats have been won by the Mulayam Singh Yadav and Sonia Gandhi families.

If the Gandhis have won Rae Bareli and Amethi seats, the winners among Yadavs are Mulayam Singh Yadav from Mainpuri and Azamgarh, his daughter-in law Dimple Yadav, nephew Dharmendra Yadav and Prof Ram Gopal Yadav’s son Akshay Yadav.But this lok Sabha election has led to annihilation of Bahujan Samaj Party. In the last lok Sabha election, Mayawati’s BSP had won 20 seats but this time it has failed to open its account despite getting 19.9 per cent of the votes polled. In contrast, the Congress, which polled 7.2 per cent of votes has won two seats. This indicates a shift of Dalit votes to the BJP this time. 

The BSP did get almost 20 per cent votes of Dalits, but they did not vote note en bloc as they had done in the last two Assembly elections and the 2009 lok Sabha poll. The votes of Dalits, who account for almost 23 per cent of the electorate, did get fragmented and a large chunk went to Modi and the BJP.

After the drubbing she got in the 2012 Assembly election, Mayawati did try to replicate her social engineering formula of combining Brahmins and Dalit in this lok Sabha election by fielding 21 Brahmins in the state. But the upper caste also went with the BJP leaving BSP high and dry.

A senior bureaucrat had told ‘he Pioneer’ that Jats and Jatavs in western Uttar Pradesh voted in favour of the  western UP had witnessed one of the ugliest communal riots last year and Jat-Jatav voting pattern was ascribed to the polarisation of votes in that area. But this pattern was visible in other parts of the state also, leading to a quantum jump in BJP’s fortune.

Besides, this election has also raised a question mark on Muslims’ voting pattern. With BJP getting over 42 per cent votes, it is a clear indication that a section of the minorities must have voted in its favour. The talk of tactical voting is now a thing of passé as far Muslim voting is concerned.  The lok Sabha result will now put a big question mark on the future of Akhilesh Yadav Government. The Samajwadi Party had contested this election on the “achievements” of its Government’s two-year rule. With this election seen as a referendum for the present regime, it could be requiem for the Samajwadi Party Government in Uttar Pradesh.