With the veneer of invincibility gone after losing assembly elections in three key Hindi states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the pre-poll alliance of Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party is all set to be challenging for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the coming Lok Sabha elections.
Even as the BJP, during its national executive meeting in Delhi, chose to disdain the alliance with Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying “the next Lok Sabha elections will be choice between majboor (helpless) and majboot (strong) government”, the BJP would no longer get the benefit of division of votes and reap rich political dividends as it had got in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and later the UP assembly polls in March 2017.
The coming together of the SP and BSP also poses challenge before the BJP to prevent the arithmetic from turning into chemistry and preventing the non-Jatav communities from returning to the BSP fold.
The non-Jatavs had overwhelmingly voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2017 elections.
The BJP will also make attempts to widen the social and political faultlines between the SP and BSP. “Mayawati referred to the infamous state Guest House incident of June 2, 1995 at Lucknow but stopped short of saying that the BSP had either forgotten it or the incident was unfortunate,” said a BJP leader, not seemingly perturbed by the alliance.
“We will go to the people on the basis of achievements of our governments at the Centre and UP to achieve the target of 73 plus seats in UP. The people of UP in 2017 saw the team of ‘do ladke’ (Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi) pledging to continue the alliance in 2019 Lok Sabha election. History is being repeated and now the SP and BSP are saying the same thing, that their alliance will last long and they will fight the 2022 UP assembly elections together,” said BJP general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak.
Professor and head of School of Social Sciences JNU, Vivek Kumar, said, “The people of UP have seen such tie-ups and they will reject the BSP-SP alliance which is banking on the sole negative agenda of preventing Narendra Modi from becoming the Prime Minister in May 2019.”