 "UP BJP President Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary with Brajesh Pathak and Keshav Prasad Maurya")
In June this year, Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party (SP) president and the Opposition leader in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Assembly, unveiled a “new formula” to boost the SP’s prospects before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls with a mirthful acronym, PDA.
The expanded form is Pichde (backward classes), Dalit, Alpasankhyak (minorities).
It suggested that this would be the social base on which the SP would work upon. The only notable difference between the party’s past exertions to enhance its prospects and, importantly, challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was that while Akhilesh actively courted the upper castes to shed the SP’s Yadav-Muslim tag, this time the nomenclature seemed inclusive of the non-savarnas and Muslims.
In a month, Akhilesh’s plans to regroup the backward classes suffered a setback after Madhuban Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Dara Singh Chauhan resigned from the Assembly, quit the SP, and joined — or rather, rejoined — the BJP, which he left before the 2022 state polls. Shortly thereafter, the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) and its six legislators left the SP-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) coalition and embraced the BJP-helmed National Democratic Alliance.
Like Chauhan, SBSP chief and Zaroorabad MLA Om Prakash Rajbhar contested the 2017 Assembly polls under the BJP umbrella and picked up four seats. Chauhan and the SBSP’s ‘ghar wapsi’ (homecoming) were expectedly celebrated by the BJP, which hoped to recover ground lost to the SP in 2022 in eastern UP, or to be precise, the areas to the east of Kaushambi, abutting Prayagraj.
While the SBSP draws its strength from the Rajbhars, Chauhan, despite being a habitual party-hopper who travelled the gamut from the Congress to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), BJP, and SP, still has a following among the Nonias.
The Rajbhas and Nonias are counted among UP’s most backward castes, a constituency the BJP assiduously wooed to shake off its upper-caste image.
SP Spokesperson Anurag Bhadouria downplayed the significance of the recent defections, saying, “Rajbhar and Chauhan have lost their credibility because their voters are now unsure to which party they will migrate to if elected.”
Descriptions of the state of UP’s Opposition ranged from “pathetic” and “strong” to a circumspect “hopeful”.
A former SP leader said, “The Opposition is not willing to discuss the problems before it. It thinks there is no problem; therefore, how can it find a solution? People have little confidence in the Opposition leaders. The trust deficit is low among the leaders themselves, and the ability to connect with people is missing. It’s not as though there is no anti-incumbency against the sitting BJP government. But the Opposition is unable to zero in on issues and articulate them credibly.”
Speaking on the fault lines within the SP, the leader said Akhilesh’s uncle, Shivpal Singh Yadav, party secretary and Jaswantnagar legislator, still did not command the “confidence and respect” of the party president as he did with his late father, Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Shivpal, rated as an organiser par excellence, was briefly estranged from Akhilesh when he floated his party, the Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party (Lohiya), and damaged the SP in the previous Assembly elections in its west-central UP borough.
“Shivpal is still not on the same page as Akhilesh and doesn’t have a say in party affairs as he did earlier,” said the leader.
During the recent civic polls, which went the BJP’s way, the Opposition’s allegation was that people were not allowed to exercise their franchise fairly, and hence the level playing field was uneven. However, an SP source pointed out that days before voting, the party lost an “important” district functionary, Jaiveer Singh, who headed the Meerut unit along with an entourage of others, to the BJP.
“Mulayam would have immediately reached out to those wanting to quit and persuaded them to stay on. Akhilesh was nonchalant,” the source said.
However, Bhadouria insisted the Opposition was “strong”.
“The core issues this time are price rise, unemployment, and atrocities against women. The BJP is running away from these and doing only event management,” he said.
Salman Khurshid, a Congress Working Committee member and a former UP Congress Committee president, maintained that the Congress, SP, and RLD were “attempting to bring about a larger alliance and reducing the BJP’s seats by half, which it won’t be able to make up anywhere in the country”.
“Right now people are working on the arithmetic, but we will have to work out the right kind of chemistry,” he added.
Asked how circumstances could possibly be different by 2024, Khurshid said, “In the 2022 Assembly polls, people voted for the Opposition, largely the SP, but the SP didn’t get enough to unseat the BJP. But even during voting, it seemed that people were rearranging their thoughts for the parliamentary polls.”
From 47 in 2017, SP’s tally went up to 108, but the RLD could secure only eight of 33 seats it contested in West UP, confirming that the Jat-dominated region remained firmly with the BJP.
But the elephant in the room was the BSP, whose tally lately has declined so abysmally that it got just one seat in the last state election.
After-poll analyses and data indicated that the Dalit votes, including those of a section of the Jatavs to which Mayawati, the BSP chief, belonged to, drifted away to the BJP.
At a recent BSP meeting in Delhi, Mayawati reportedly told her colleagues that she would maintain equidistance from the BJP-led and Opposition coalitions and take a decision after the outcome of the Assembly polls this year to ensure a “balance of power”.
It was apparent that she was keeping the BSP’s options open.
