Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Jayant Chaudhary’s “Dil Jeet Liya (You’ve won hearts)” post after the conferment of Bharat Ratna to his grandfather and former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh had deeper political undertones than many might have read.
In a way, the Centre’s decision to bestow the highest civilian award to one of the stalwarts of agrarian politics sealed Jayant’s switch to the BJP-led NDA camp months ahead of the all-crucial parliamentary polls.
Jayant formally announced on February 12 that his party will be joining the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Many political commentators see Jayant's plan to include RLD within the BJP-led NDA fold as part of a larger plan to revive the core vote base and a concerted attempt to make his party more relevant in western UP, rather than to reduce the impact of the RLD's shift to a few seats in its main area of influence - Western Uttar Pradesh.
RLD's consolidation strategy
After the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, when there was a strong polarisation among Jats, the RLD remained in the secular camp. It lost a sizable chunk of its Jat base to the BJP in the aftermath of the riots and for several years it failed to recover that base.
It managed a partial recovery in the 2022 Assembly elections. It won nine seats in alliance with the SP. Eight out of nine seats were from the Hastinapur belt where sugarcane farmers are present in sizable numbers.
The farm protest against the Union government's farm laws got good traction among the sugarcane farmers and that contributed to the RLD's revival in this belt. However, it failed to revive in other Jat pockets like Mathura and Bulandshahr.
The party’s core vote bank has been the Jat population. The Lok Sabha constituencies where there is most Jat population are Muzaffarnagar, Kiarana, Bijnor, Nageena for Chandrashekhar Vavan, Mathura, Baghpat, Amroha, Fatehpur Sekri, Meerut, Hathras, Bulandshahr, Aligarh.
How allying with BJP benefits RLD
RLD expects a better conversion rate with the BJP as it would consolidate Jat votes. The coming together of SP-RLD was expected to consolidate Jat and Muslim votes.
However, it didn't deliver the desired results. According to many political observers, the Jat-Muslim vote bank has become non-existent, especially after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.
On the contrary, Jats either vote for BJP or RLD, and with both parties coming together Jats can vote en masse for the NDA.
How BJP stands to benefit from its new ally
Despite spectacular wins since 2014, west Uttar Pradesh had been a cause for concern for the BJP. Of the 16 seats that the BJP had lost in UP. in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, seven were from west U.P. Even in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh polls, the opposition alliance won 17 of the 27 seats in Moradabad division against BJP’s 10 and nine of the 16 seats in Saharanpur region.
RLD’s recent political alignments
The RLD hasn't been a BJP ally since over a decade. The last time RLD was a BJP ally was in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, 15 years ago. Then in 2012, they joined the Congress-led UPA. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and 2022 Assembly elections, the RLD was part of the Samajwadi Party-led alliance.
RLD's vote share over the years
Since RLD’s first general election in 1998, the party’s vote share has remained less than 1%. Its vote share had dropped from 0.44 in 2009 to 0.13 in 2014.
However, after the 2019 general elections, the party is seen to be having upward trajectory in vote gathering as it polled 0.24 in 2019.
Moreover, in 2022 Assembly elections, the party for the first time was able to cross three percent vote share to 3.18 owing to farm law protests it had supported vigorously.
Before that, in its 27-year electoral history, the highest the party had polled was in 2002 at 2.65%. In addition to that, in 2004, the party had contested highest number of seats winning 3 out of 10.
In 2009, it won the most number of seats in its electoral history, winning 5 out of the 7 it had contested.
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