UP Assembly Elections 2022: Adityanath’s candidature seems fraught with trouble 

UP CM Yogi Adityanath's poor handling of the second pandemic wave and his not being an RSS man are likely to work against his campaign. (File photo)

Until a year ago, the road to Lucknow seemed wide open to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but not anymore.

The Uttar Pradesh elections present much of a challenge for pollsters in divining parties’ fortunes, particularly since there seems to be no strong ‘wave’ in favour of anyone. The BJP’s poor performance in the Panchayat polls, coupled with the ripples created by Samajwadi Party (SP) and others, particularly in Western Uttar Pradesh, have forced commentators to admit that it is not going to be a cakewalk as the Chief Minister and his party would have hoped. 

As it happens in any election in India, things have changed at such a pace that even the party’s move to let CM Adityanath contest an assembly seat, particularly from his home district, is being scrutinised. This has cast some doubt on Adityanath and his party’s chances at capturing the largest assembly in the country. Is the party perhaps faltering in projecting Adityanath as the party’s face, as opposed to their modus operandi of projecting the PM as the face of the campaign?

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The making of Adityanath 

Yogi’s lack of leadership was visible during the second wave of COVID-19. That coupled with his monumental failure during panchayat elections, and several defections of sitting MLAs and Ministers of his government in the run-up to his elections only serve to question his way of functioning. Besides this, another thing going against Adityanath is that he was a parachute CM and his ascendence to the highest office of the state has not sat well with RSS cadres in the state. Not being an RSS man usually goes against a candidate in a party that claims to be cadre-based, and in which the rhetoric is that ‘one who works hard for the organisation gets rewarded’.

An abysmal record on law and order is neither new for UP, nor unique to it, but the Chief Minister has spun it in a way such that blaming minorities for most faults of his administration serves the dual purpose of explaining the state’s shortcomings as well as becoming a go-to campaign strategy. For a CM to brag about his government’s achievement on ‘encounter killings’ or to play-up communal tensions citing ‘love-jihad’ only feeds more into this.

BJP’s historic win in the last elections was a result of their innovative social engineering, made possible only because of the failure of other parties to take forward the ideals of JP-Lohia’s social justice cause. Parties such as SP and BSP couldn’t materialise the united Bahujan front because the lion’s share of power, resources, and representation opportunities were restricted to specific sub-castes, namely, Yadavs and Jatavs. 

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BJP’s ability to create an electoral model that combines Hindutva along with the questions of representation of neglected castes among the Bahujans cultivated a strong voter base which propelled it to more than three-fourths of the seats in an assembly of 403. Adityanath got to govern with a mandate that was unimaginable.

Five years down the line, a similar wave seems absent, with 11 non-Yadav legislators having resigned, citing the CM’s exclusionary dictates. Such a threat of failing to hold on to such a mandate, as well as the risk of further erosion of an electoral base in the state, would perhaps generally prompt a party to explore safer bets during the campaign. However, in BJP’s case, the party leadership seems fundamentally behind Yogi as their face in UP, making one wonder whether it is a show of confidence or the fact that benching him would have probably meant accepting that the discontent against him and the party is real.

One wonders if another reason for the party leadership standing behind Yogi could lie in their desperation to find a second line of leadership to replace the current lot after their time is over. After all, the only difference in terms of operation between Yogi and a young Modi is that the former doesn’t refer to himself in the third person. The use of polemics and rhetoric, disregard for democratic institutions, and disdain for secularism and progressiveness are common to both. 

If at all something is going in Yogi’s favour, it is that he will be able to campaign in all the regions of the state before eastern UP goes to polls in the last phase of the elections. So, he has a logistical upper hand here. There have been times when several ‘party-face’ candidates have lost their seats in their commitment to winning the entire state for the party. But that does not seem to apply to Yogi this time around.

 (The authors are researchers at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. The views expressed are personal.)