With an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party has intensified its campaign to mobilise the traditional votebank of OBCs and Muslims across the state.
SP president Akhilesh Yadav is on a whistle-stop visit to the Yadav belt of the state in Etawah, Etah, Mainpuri and Kannauj. He has already announced his intention to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Kannauj, the traditional stronghold of the SP. The party lost this seat to BJP in 2019.
The controversy over the reservation for OBCs in the urban local body polls has provided adrenaline to the Samajwadi Party spearheading its campaign to paint the BJP anti-OBCs. Beyond the legality of reservations for the OBCs in the urban local body polls, this issue has wider ramifications in politics, much beyond the boundaries of UP.
This is reflected by the speed with which the BJP-led state government has moved the Supreme Court, challenging the Allahabad High Court’s verdict of December 27, annulling its notification of December 5 that provided for OBC reservations for the urban local body elections.
The high court held that the impugned notification was issued without following the triple-test formula prescribed by the Supreme Court and ordered the state government to hold elections without reservations. Within 24 hours, the UP government not only moved the apex court in a bid to get the stay order but also appointed a five-member commission to recommend OBC quota.
Whatever be the outcome of the legal battle, campaigns for political mobilisation on the issue have already been launched by the political parties in UP.
While Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has assured that civic elections will be held only after the SC mandated process is followed, the Samajwadi Party has accused the BJP of fooling the OBCs and announced a state-wide agitation.
BSP president and former CM Mayawati has also jumped in the fray. She has asked her party cadre to fan out and mobilise the OBC communities. At stake for various competitors for political power in the Hindi heartland are the OBC voters who emerged as a category through the Mandal Commission report and propelled OBC leaders Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav to power in the late 1980s in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively.
By forging a tactical alliance with the OBCs and Muslims, these parties displaced the Congress in UP and Bihar. Later, they emerged as a major stumbling block for the ascendance of the BJP in these states after the terminal decline of the Congress.
In UP, after the defeat of the BJP in the 1993 mid-term poll to the UP assembly, there was a formation of the SP-BSP coalition. The coalition did not last long and the BSP formed the government in June 1995 with outside support by the BJP.
Following various social engineering experiments to sub-divide the OBC and Dalit categories, which led to the formation of the BSP government in 2007 and the SP government in 2012, the BJP succeeded in 2017 under the leadership of Narendra Modi by weaning away non-Yadav OBCs from the Samajwadi Party and non-Jatav Dalits from the Bahujan Samaj Party.
The sweeping success of the BJP in the 2022 UP assembly elections corroborated the hypothesis of OBC vote-bank fragmentation to the advantage of the BJP. The fresh controversy over the reservation for OBCs in urban local body elections has given a ray of hope to the Samajwadi Party to win back its OBC votebank from the BJP.