Uttar Pradesh has spoken. The bellwether state that sends 80 parliamentarians to the Lok Sabha has proved to be a game-changer with the INDIA alliance managing to wrest 41 seats. It has been a neck-and-neck fight with the Samajwadi Party winning 34 seats and the Congress seven, while the BJP is ahead on 36 seats, its partners the RLD having won two seats.
In fact after an early scare, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was leading by over one lakh votes from Varanasi, a far cry from the resounding six lakh victory he coasted to in the 2019 elections. The state is witnessing some giant defeats including that of Smriti Irani from Amethi, Sanjeev Baliyan from Muzaffarnagar and Maneka Gandhi from Sultanpur.
The BJP leadership is putting up a brave front but these losses are going to significantly alter the politics of UP in the days to come. It is obvious that the “double engine sarkar” has run out of steam. The farmers, the Dalits and the marginalised sections of the state are no longer willing to buy the Ram Rajya dream being propagated by the Modi-Yogi duo. Akhilesh Yadav chose wisely by fielding candidates from other castes in order to widen his vote bank.
Yogi Adityanath has been an insufferable chief minister who claimed that it was due to his “hard hitting” policies that he was able to provide an effective administration. Travelling across UP, (while covering these elections) people living in cities spoke in one voice that “goonda gardi” had been reduced under the Yogi raj.
But facts on the ground tell another story. After coming to power in 2017, Yogi was responsible for 1,100 encounter killings that left 49 killed and 370 injured across Meerut, Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Noida and several other cities. When there was a hue and cry around these extra-judicial killings, the UP police switched over to half-encounters where young boys were picked and shot below their abdomen.
Retired DIG of police Vikram Singh was aghast at these “half-encounters”. “Let us not fool ourselves. An encounter is an encounter which has very little impact on the crime rate in a state. Experience has shown us in both Punjab and Manipur that a target-oriented policy has never delivered results,” he said.
But so emboldened was Yogi by the success of these encounters that the police did not hesitate to shoot gangster Atiq Ahmed on live TV in April 2023 as they did Vikas Dubey in 2020. Yogi also enjoyed the sobriquet of “bulldozer baba”. He thought nothing of ordering the bulldozing of the homes and businesses of people who he believed were “troublemakers”. It is no coincidence that the majority of the homes destroyed belonged to the Muslim community.
It is Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits who have combined to vote en bloc in favour of the Samajwadi Party. Mayawati’s traditional Jatav vote has also switched over to vote for the SP in these elections.
This has come as a shock to Modi who had believed the saffron party had made huge inroads with the Dalit and OBC vote bank. But the Dalits remain convinced that if the BJP returned to power with a majority, they would amend the Constitution and remove reservations, and have voted en masse for the SP and Congress.
Both Modi and Yogi presented themselves as macho leaders. Whenever Yogi was asked to address a public rally, he would spit out tough talk which lacked all constitutional propriety. In Jodhpur, last year while canvassing for the Rajasthan assembly elections, he told the public, that “if the protestors had been in UP, the state government bulldozer would have crushed them by now”.
Modi also has not hesitated to use Islamophobic language against the 200-million-strong Muslim population right through these elections. But the Muslims have joined hands to vote against the BJP. Surprisingly, the much-touted construction and consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, in which both Modi and Yogi had personally invested a great deal, has not proved a vote-catcher, with the SP candidate Awadesh Prasad winning the Faizabad seat against BJP’s Lallu Singh.
Said Jaggu Ram, a landless Dalit farmer from Ayodhya, “Yogiji likes to do stunt-baazi to win media attention. Last year, for Deepotsav, 25 lakh diyas were lit along the Saryu river. Next morning, poor children and women were seen collecting the residual oil from these diyas. It shows the government had no concern for the poor. The government used 72,000 litres of oil for these diyas in a state where the poor do not get one proper meal in a day.”
Voters across the state have been demanding accountability from their representatives.
This is both a political and a personal defeat for the prime minister. Livelihood concerns have dominated the elections; price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, MSP for farmers and the misuse of agencies like the ED have been part of the discourse by the common man.
UP is also one of the most poorly performing economies amongst all our states. With a population of 200 million, its per capita income is below that of sub-Saharan Africa according to World Bank statistics. Its share of industrial growth has declined from 9.9% in 2012-17 to a mere 0.6% in 2017-22. In terms of the number of factories, Bihar saw a 100% increase, Haryana saw a 200% increase, Assam an increase of 200% while the increase in UP has been around 60%. There has been a breakdown of infrastructure, failure to redistribute land and a dismal law and order situation.
There was a great deal of speculation in the media about how Yogi and Home Minister Amit Shah are at loggerheads and that the latter has not lost an opportunity to sideline him at the national level. It is also well known that CM Yogi has been hamstrung in not being able to appoint senior bureaucrats and police officials of his choice. In fact, even the selection of candidates in UP has been decided by Modi-Shah and not by him.
But the public in UP are in an unforgiving mood. They were not willing to forgive Smriti Irani for her arrogance and her non-performance on the ground. Nor are they happy with the arrogance shown by other top leaders of the BJP.
The “do ladkon ki jodi” (Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi) combination worked. Modi’s anti-dynasty talk has made little headway. The massive BJP outreach at the grassroots level failed to hit home. Modi’s charisma and guarantees have not cut any ice. People want jobs and self-respect. The Yogi-Modi duo failed to provide either.
Rashme Sehgal is an author and an independent journalist
