The meetings by opposition leaders in Lutyens Delhi lately have a one-point agenda — to stop Narendra Modi from coming to power again in 2024. But is it possible without these forces allying to first try to stop Yogi Adityanath from returning to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2022?
The answer is a matter of debate, but so far the ‘united opposition’ has no plan in place for the crucial Uttar Pradesh elections, which are less than six months away, besides the hope that the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party can beat the BJP riding on the anti-incumbency factor. Yadav wants no alliance with either an extremely weak Congress or Mayawati’s BSP, making it a possibly three-cornered contest, which perfectly suits the BJP as it will relish the divided house come 2022.
Yadav had attended a meeting of opposition bigwigs summoned by senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal recently where some made a case for strengthening Yadav’s hands for the UP elections. But Yadav skipped a subsequent even more high-profile opposition meeting called by interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi, indicating that UP elections are his sole fight against the BJP.
BSP supremo Mayawati was not invited to that meeting, given the uneasy equation she shares with Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi and after how her MLAs were poached by the Congress in Rajasthan.
The Political Logic
The political logic goes that in a three-cornered fight in Uttar Pradesh, one needs to get about 34% vote share to cross the 202-seat majority mark in the assembly. The BJP got nearly 40% vote share in the 2017 polls to reach the mammoth 312 seats on its own. UP has six major voting groups — Upper Castes, Yadavs, Muslims, Non-Yadav OBCs, Dalits and extremely backward castes (EBC). The political argument is that whoever gets the votes of more than two groups clinches victory.
In 2017, the BJP, however, secured the votes of nearly three-and-a-half groups — with Non-Yadav OBCs, Upper Castes and EBCs rallying behind it along with some Dalit votes, which was unprecedented. Muslim votes got divided between the SP-Congress alliance and the BSP, while the upper-caste votes of the Congress moved to the BJP seeing the former ally with the SP.
What seems different this time is Muslim voters consolidating behind the SP, turning wiser after the result of the Bihar and West Bengal elections. In Bihar, the AIMIM split Muslim votes and the Congress cornered too many seats in the alliance with the RJD that led to the victory of Nitish-BJP combine. But in West Bengal, Muslims dumped the Congress to back TMC.
Akhilesh’s Calculations
The Muslim and Yadav support is what seems to be fueling Akhileh’s hopes of going alone in the 2022 elections, thinking that he can wean back the non-Yadav OBC group from the BJP in some measure through alliances with smaller parties and thus sail through in 2022. Mayawati’s recent campaign pitch for Brahmin votes too comes amidst the realistion in her party that the Muslim voters are no longer with her.
Not having an alliance with the Congress suits Yadav as even a weak Congress can hurt the BJP by splitting the upper-caste votes, which are with the BJP so far. Yadav does not want to give Congress a big chunk of seats either.
“Not having an alliance with the Congress in UP is the real alliance,” a SP leader told News18. An unstated understanding, like the TMC and Congress had in West Bengal, is however not ruled out.
BJP looks Assured
Fighting a divided Opposition in an election that is expected to be deeply polarised is what suits the BJP in UP. The Ram Temple construction issue is expected to unite the majority population across caste groups. The BJP has already started cornering the SP on its support for Muslims with Yogi Adityanath referring to Mulayam Singh Yadav as ‘Abbajaan’ and BJP questioning if Akhilesh Yadav did not come to pay last respects to Kalyan Singh because it would have offended Muslim voters.
The BJP feels the Muslim vote may not even unite as these voters are widely spread and divided across regions. Recent repeated references by Adityanath to both Priyanka Gandhi and Mayawati indicate that the BJP wants them to be considered reasonable forces by people so that the anti-incumbency votes do not transfer enmasse to the SP, but rather get divided between the three opposition parties. The BJP also expects its allies in Apna Dal and Nishad Party to help keep its OBC vote bank together.
“We may drop some seats (from 325 with NDA), but hope to win easily. The opposition parties are underestimating the immense popularity of Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister,” a top BJP leader from UP told News18. A win in Uttar Pradesh is the springboard BJP needs to take wind out of the sails of ‘opposition unity’ in 2024.
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