SP's moves to embrace symbols of Hindutva are targeted at the 2024 polls

Earlier this month, the Samajwadi Party (SP) organised its party workers’ training camps at Hindu religious sites of Devkali and Naimisharanya Dham in Lakhimpur Kheri and Sitapur districts, respectively. SP President Akhilesh Yadav held meetings with the seers and offered obeisance in temples.
 

At Naimisharanya Dham on June 10, Yadav, while addressing the SP rank and file, emphatically stated his party had been “soft” but it was time to take a hard stance.
 

“The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is saying that it appears we (SP) are also treading the path of soft Hindutva … there is no need to panic … we have been very soft and the need is to now become hard,” the former UP chief minister reportedly told party workers.
 

Now with the 2024 parliamentary elections less than nine months away, the SP is experimenting with yet another template of combining a soft Hindutva tenor with its time-tested Muslim-Yadav combination to reclaim its lost political capital vis-à-vis the BJP.

Since the Ram temple in Ayodhya is expected to be completed before the Lok Sabha polling starts early next year, the BJP is expected to amplify the development during canvassing since the temple issue has long been included in its core poll manifestos.

Realising these ground realities in UP, which sends the highest number of MPs (80) to the Lok Sabha, the SP may have been forced to make a course correction in its political chessboard lest it extract yet another defeat at the hustings.
 

The party has had a series of reverses despite experimenting with a gamut of political combinations and permutations over the past nearly a decade, but has failed each time to repeat the stupendous success of the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. Since Yadav formed the government in 2012, it has been a downslide for the socialist party, which conceded its hard-earned political bandwidth to the BJP in four major polls — the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and the 2017 and 2022 UP Assembly polls.
 

The SP even joined hands with arch rivals Congress (2017) and Bahujan Samaj Party (2019), thus forming pre-poll alliances to queer the BJP pitch. Yet the efforts came to a naught.
 

Last year, Akhilesh Yadav also mended fences with his estranged uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav to strengthen the party and mollify disgruntled elements in the ruling family. The use of soft Hindutva seems to be another bow in its quiver to make its way back in the political reckoning.
 

But the party rubbishes the suggestion of soft Hindutva as figments of imagination and those inflicted by the BJP.
 

Senior SP leader and former UP cabinet minister Rajendra Chaudhary said the soft Hindutva allegation was coined by the BJP for vested political interests, and the SP did not have any such agenda.
 

“The SP follows the principles of secularism as enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Even otherwise, we have always been going to temples and offering prayers, but we also support religious freedom to all citizens as provided in the Constitution,” he said. The BJP is equally dismissive of the soft Hindutva line purportedly taken by the SP or its potency to deliver any goods, political or electoral.
 

A senior BJP leader, on condition of anonymity, said the SP had the tendency of adopting a new poll agenda before elections. “The soft Hindutva approach is one such desperate attempt of the SP, but the electorate is wise enough to see through their designs. This experiment will fail and the people will ensure their defeat once again in UP,” he said. He further recalled that the Mulayam Singh Yadav government (in 1990) had ordered police firing on kar sewaks in Ayodhya during the Ram temple movement, something people have neither forgotten nor forgiven.
 

Meanwhile, political commentator and economist A P Tiwari observed that the SP had taken recourse to soft Hindutva and chosen Hindu religious places of “epic significance” to impart training to party workers with a view to mobilising the Hindu vote.
 

“However, the soft Hindu electoral tactic of the SP could also impact its electoral Muslim base. Contrastingly, the BJP’s Hindutva is potentially tenable, especially in terms of the Lord Ram temple at Ayodhya and the backdrop of the Ram temple movement and its aftermath,” he said.
 

“The BJP’s calculus of caste inclusiveness, religious tourism, and social sector handouts appears to be much more promising from the electorate prism before the 2024 polls,” he added