Economic Issues Gain Importance In Up Elections

of a triangular balance of power.

The recent Uttar Pradesh assembly elections indicate that economic factors have once again begun to play a role in determining political choices in the state, even though caste remains the dominant factor. The 1991 and 1993 elections were based more overtly on religion and caste-based polarisations.

A sort of triangular balance seems to have emerged from the political realignment of three large sections of Uttar Pradeshs population, each with antagonistic economic and political interests. The BSPs vote remains largely caste-based, coming from the scheduled castes and some of the most backward among other castes, but there is an economic logic to this bloc too, since most of these voters are landless rural labourers.

Differences from the past are more marked among those who backed the two other major formations, the BJP and the United Front.

Rather than a broad Hindu vote, the BJP appears to have come, more obviously than before, to represent the upper castes, which dominate urban areas and seek to hold on to political clout in rural areas, where many of them are losing out to communities like the Jats, Gujjars and Yadavs. These communities have emerged over the past generation as the new landed peasantry.

Plus, the BJP appears to have retained the votes of those of the backward castes that are upwardly mobile in socio-economic terms but do not have sufficient clout to lead their own formations, as the Jats and the Yadavs do. These communities include the Lodhis and many of the Kurmis and Sainis.

The United Front, contesting elections as a combination in the heartland for the first time, emerged much more as the political vehicle of the land-owning peasantry than either the Janata Dal or the Samajwadi Party separately did. In 1991 and 1993, both the JD and SP were associated with Muslim support in the minds of many Hindu voters.>