Podcast | Decoding 2019: BJP may not have a strong hold on Uttar Pradesh anymore

R Mahadevan | Rakesh SharmaMoneycontrol Contributors

The Lok Sabha elections are almost upon us. This is the final lead-up to the polls, and the kind of cross currents visible around the country are testimony to the fact that this election is quite unlike the previous ones. Till the 2014 elections, it was essentially between two large forces, with smaller parties for assistance. But 2014 proved that the Congress was no longer the force it had been since Independence. In fact, its tally of 44 reduced it to the level of a regional party, an aslo-ran. It left the Bharatiya Janata Party as the sole power, pointing to a unipolar party scenario in India.

However, by all indications, the BJP has not been able to convert it huge advantage, when on its own it had a simple majority, something that no party had managed for decades. It virtually swept the Hindi heartland and Gujarat and Maharashtra. It was the kind of performance that proved extreme muscularity. However, as time went on, it became more and more obvious that it was going to be difficult to replicate such a strong showing. This meant that the almost certain losses in these strongholds would have to be made up in other states and regions. To put it simply, most of these gains would have to come from the south, east and northeast.

This election has curiously become a one versus many contest. It is the BJP on one hand and the others on the other. The situation looked like the BJP versus a mega coalition, especially given the common goal of the opposition to get rid of the BJP. Or, that is how it was talked about as late as a year ago. However, things have changed now, and the BJP too is stitching up an alliance – a wide-ranging alliance – something of “slightly less maha-gatbandhan”. Meanwhile, the mahagatbandhan of the opposition itself has meandered somewhat purposelessly, making this is multi-lateral fight in a lot of states.

What this means is that the dynamics within each state will need tweaking, or in some cases, recalculating. Among the larger states, multilateral contests will be seen in Orissa, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telengana. Kerala does not belong in this group, if only for the fact that it has always been the Communist Party of India (Marxist) versus the Congress, with nobody else at a national level in the reckoning. This time, however, the BJP is expected to shake things up in at least two constituencies, becoming in effect the third front.

Traditionally, Uttar Pradesh has been the state that has been in the best focus. After all, it has the largest electorate and the largest number of Lok Sabha seats. After the bifurcation, UP has remained the largest, though not by as much of a margin as before. UP, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have by far the biggest say, as far as individual states are concerned. With strong regional parties, these states demand that there be an electoral understanding for national parties to make a mark.

Let us look at Uttar Pradesh. It has always attracted the most attention in Lok Sabha polls, and quite naturally, because of the hugely disproportionate number of seats.

A little bit of recent history is more than useful here. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had literally swept the Hindi belt – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Chattisgarh. It had also swept Gujarat, winning everything, and performed exceedingly well in Maharashtra along with the Shiv Sena. Most of its seats had come from these states. In the Hindi heartland, the BJP won 191 out of 226 seats. If that wasn’t a sweep, its allies won a further 11 seats, for a total tally of 202 for the National Democratic Alliance. With such an overwhelming performance concentrated in these few states, it is expected that the party will not be able to hold its predominant position and has to lose a few seats. The question is only of how much.

In Uttar Pradesh, things are very different from 2014, when the BJP decimated every other party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was blanked even though it contested all the 80 seats. The 2014 election saw a massive wave against the status quo, with the BJP complementing its Hindutva agenda with a new narrative of inclusive economic growth, wiping out corruption, and bringing a new dawn for the nation. The people identified with this package, especially in the north. In Uttar Pradesh, this enabled the BJP to win 71 of the 78 seats it contested. Its NDA ally, Apna Dal, won the two seats it contested. In 2019, this narrative is no longer as relevant, with agrarian distress and unemployment taking centre stage. The change in mood was shown up well in the assembly elections and some of the key byelections. Except for gaining the north-east, the BJP has done rather poorly in most other places. In Karnataka, the gains were not so visible, and even though the BJP emerged as the single largest party, it was pipped at the post by the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) stitching together a post-poll alliance and the Congress taking the strategic decision of ceding to the lesser partner.

The BJP also lost the important heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to the Congress, even if by the smallest of margins in the first two. This was a huge turnaround, considering that the BJP had more or less wiped out the Congress in these states. But, as far as Uttar Pradesh is concerned, it was what happened before these assembly elections that gives a pointer to the prevailing mood, and to the possible voting pattern in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. In March 2018, byelections were held in Uttar Pradesh to two Lok Sabha seats and one State Assembly seat. In a scenario where one party had swept the elections previously, byelections would naturally be of great interest, as some kind of litmus test of whether the party retained its hold over the electorate. In this case, there was even more attention on the bypolls because the constituencies were Gorakhpur and Phulpur, perhaps the two most important seats at the time. These two seats went for polls after the chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, and his deputy, Keshav Prasad Maurya, had vacated the seats to helm the state government.

This was also the time when Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav had sunk their differences, and the BSP and SP had gone into the byelections as a united front. From that point of view, it would also be a test of whether a united opposition would make a difference at the hustings. A lot hinged on the results of these two seats.

As it happened, the BJP lost both these seats to the BSP-SP combine. The Gorakhpur seat, which Adityanath had held from 1998, and had won in 2014 by a margin of more than 3 lakh votes, lost by over 20,000 votes. This was like a foretaste of things to come, and a warning to the BJP about the public mood. Yogi Adityanath admitted as much, conceding that his party had been overconfident and had not understood the import of a combined opposition.

This essentially is the setting in which Uttar Pradesh goes to the Lok Sabha polls too, with the BSP and SP holding on to their alliance, which for the moment seems to be a winning one.

The question that comes up in Uttar Pradesh is about the Congress, which has chosen to go it alone after the “mahagatbandhan” talks failed. The discussion was set to fail, what with the BSP-SP alliance offering the Congress two seats. So, the situation is that the Congress is set to contest all 80 seats in the state.

However, in UP, the Congress was not a meaningful force in 2014, getting a measly 7.5 percent of the votes in 2014.There is little to indicate that the situation has changed dramatically. So, the fact that the Congress is going it alone in the state and might end up splitting the anti-BJP vote is not substantial. In fact, there is even the reading that the Congress voters, seeing the improbability of the party putting up a good show, might even end up voting for the BSP-SP combine, leading to less fracturing of votes.

In the byelections of 2018, the vote swing against the BJP was more than 8.5 percent, indicating substantial change in its popularity index. Since those bypolls, when the aftermath of the demonetization and GST implementation could be considered reasons for the reversal, the ground situation has changed – in what direction and by how much is still not definitely known. The factors of unemployment and agrarian distress have come in, the second of which showed its strong hand in the assembly elections of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The BJP has got a fillip from the tragic attack at Pulwama, enabling it to shift to the nationalism and national security narrative. The Hindutva agenda continues to be strong. But how sticky will these be, and can they override the economy-based issues? That remains to be seen.

Coming back to the matter of vote swing. Former psephologist and political analyst Yogendra Yadav, is of the opinion that the 2014 showing of the BJP in the north is an outlier, something of a black swan. Extrapolating from the byelection results, he says that with a similar swing of 8.5-9 per cent across Uttar Pradesh, the BJP will get pretty much decimated, to end up with a tally of 12-13 seats. But considering that is quite unlikely that this extent of vote swing can happen across the entire state, one might look at swings of 6 and 3 per cent; in these cases, too the BJP is set to lose a number of seats. Yadav’s numbers say that with a 6 percent swing, the seat count would be about 23 and with a 3 percent swing it would be around 34-35.

The reason one might forward for a higher swing in UP is that it is an overwhelmingly rural and agrarian state. The BJP’s traditional strength is the urban areas. With the promised jobs not happening and the furthering of the agrarian problem, it could be argued that BJP will do more badly than expected. This argument would also be buttressed if the results of the Gorakhpur and Phulpur byelections are taken to show that Adityanath’s actions can impact Lok Sabha seats. Adityanath has not really done much for the state that can be effectively showcased. On top of that are the memories of lynchings, the anti Romeo squad, and inflammatory speeches. The Ayodhya issue, with the BJP’s promises remaining more or less that, is also to be considered, with the ability to make a few of the more heavily invested Hindutva loyalists frown.

Uttar Pradesh in a sense holds even more importance than normal. Its mood can be part of a widespread feeling across the Hindi belt. And if this feeling is negative, substantially negative, then it becomes imperative for the BJP to make up the shortfall in other places, which are those regions and states where the party has traditionally been weak.

If the relative unpopularity of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh is accepted, then the BSP-SP combine could come out of the election with 40-60 seats. If the BJP-led NDA is unable to get the required numbers, this would give the alliance enormous bargaining power in the scenario of a non-NDA coalition forming the government at the Centre.

With opinion polls becoming more and more unpredictable, it comes to the exit polls after election day, which are generally more reliable. Whatever the outcome, this election promises to be as absorbing as the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.