Samajwadi Party, apparently under pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party, has now gone into an overdrive to reach out to the non-Yadav OBC voters. The BJP had reaped rich political dividends by focusing on non Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in three successive elections -- in 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and 2017 UP assembly elections.
Ahead of the crucial UP assembly elections, the SP is trying to overcome its limitation of being and shown as a Yadav-dominated party. Its leadership is now into an overdrive to reach out to non Yadav OBCs and to expand further. With this objective the SP has stitched electoral alliances with small caste-based parties.
SP state president Naresh Uttam Patel on August 29 started the ‘Kisan Naujawan Patel Yatra’ targeting the dominant OBC caste Kurmi voters who for the last three elections have backed the BJP.
Banking on the current farmers’ unrest against the BJP government, Naresh Uttam, a Kurmi himself, is reaching out to these sections. “The Narendra Modi government is vacillating on the caste census. Even the reservation policy is in danger today. The farmers are not getting the promised minimum support price. And their justified demands are met with lath-charge and oppression. The government is busy branding the agitating farmers as separatists,” he said.
Apart from this, on August 9, the party launched OBC sammelans. The first phase of these sammelans was organised in the central UP and Bundelkhand areas and later it will move to the Purvanchal belt.
SP is maintaining distance from the Congress and has tied up with smaller caste-based parties such as the Mahan Dal, which is led by Keshav Dev Maurya, and Sanjay Chauhan’s Janwadi Socialist Party. Sanjay Chauhan’s party has a strong hold among the Lonia Chauhan community, an extremely backward caste of the OBC category which has a considerable presence across eastern Uttar Pradesh. Maurya’s Mahan Dal came into being in 2008 and the Maurya community this party represents is estimated to be around 6 per cent of the total voters in the state. Though both parties are marginal forces, Mahan Dal had 0.1 per cent vote share in the 2017 UP assembly election. SP is hoping that bringing them on board will broaden its reach.
The non-Yadav OBCs that broke away from the umbrella social justice politics dominated by the Yadavs have become the bedrock of BJP politics in the state. One of the key reasons for the spectacular jump in the BJP’s electoral performance from 47 seats in the 2012 assembly elections in which it managed to get just 15 per cent of the votes to 312 seats in 2017 elections by cornering nearly 40 per cent votes is consolidation of these non-Yadav OBCs under the ‘Grand Hindu Identity’.
In August, addressing the Mahan Dal meeting, SP president Akhilesh Yadav accused the BJP of driving a wedge between the backward communities by pitting Yadavs against the rest of the OBCs. His frustration is evident as SP leaders themselves concede that the BJP’s strategy of isolating the Yadavs has worked.
“Samajwadi Party stands for all backward classes, not only the Yadavs. The BJP has been successful in its smear campaign against us. But we are confident that in these seven years since 2014, the backward classes have understood the fraud perpetrated by the BJP,” SP chief spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said.