Can Amit Shah repeat 2014 in UP?

In politics it is the show of hands or the head count that matters. So, at the silver jubilee celebrations on the Samajwadi Party in Lucknow when party chief Mulayam Singh managed to line up netas such as Lalu Prasad, Sharad Yadav, former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and Lok Dal’s Ajit Singh — of course only the last with some clout in Uttar Pradesh politics — expectations ran high. Of the announcement of an alliance from the larger Janata parivar for the 2017 UP Assembly elections, along the lines of the grand alliance Nitish Kumar had managed to build in Bihar.

But this did not happen mainly because the verbal battles between UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and uncle Shivpal Yadav, who had been sacked by him as minister, continued here too. Behind the swords raised by the dignitaries on the stage, daggers lurked! While both BJP and Bahujan Samaj Party’s Mayawati are surely laughing all the way to the hustings watching this family feud, it would be naïve to write off the quintessential politician in Mulayam.

After all, 25 years ago, when Mulayam broke away from Chandrasekhar’s Samajwadi Janata Party to launch his own political outfit, not many people gave him any chance. But then the Babri masjid was demolished, the Kalyan Singh government dismissed and Mulayam managed to stitch up an alliance with arch rival Kanshi Ram and was back in the chief minister’s gaddi within a year of forming his new party. A commendable achievement.

More challenging battlefield But this time around, for 2017, the battlefield is much more challenging, and has a new player in an old party, BJP chief Amit Shah. The clean BJP sweep that he engineered in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, when a record number of 71 BJP MPs were elected, leaving only two seats for the Congress (Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi), five for the SP, two seats for BJP’s relatively unknown ally Apna Dal, and zero seats for UP’s Behenji Mayawati.

Maintenance of law and order has always been a problem in India’s largest State and Akhilesh’s government too has struggled on this count. Violence against women has continued unabated, and a couple of crass comments by the SP leadership on heinous crimes such as rape have not helped. In recent times only the SP and BSP have been major players in UP, shunting aside the BJP and reducing the Congress to a poor fourth position. But India’s grand old party managed to pull off a coup of sorts when Rahul Gandhi delivered as many as 21 MPs for the Congress from UP in 2009. The SP emerged the frontrunner, but with a slimmer margin with 23 seats; the BSP got 20 and the BJP 10.

A more confident Mayawati But the 2014 Lok Sabha election changed all that with the Modi wave annihilating all the three competitors. The biggest shock came to Mayawati. But this time around, with gaping fissures in the SP evident, it is a more combative Mayawati that we are seeing. In an interview to a TV channel last week, she described the SP as a “sinking ship”, said Akhilesh has only “brought in more criminals within the party, and people of UP have seen how his ‘young blood’ has created mayhem on the streets of UP.” Dismissing any probable alliance between the SP and Congress as one between “two dead parties”, she has named BJP “the party of cheats, who have cheated the people of India” and not kept any of their poll promises of 2014.

Mayawati is banking heavily on the Muslim vote, hoping it will move away from the two “dead parties” — SP and Congress — and towards BSP. That the BSP will remain an important player can be gauged from the fact that it got 20 per cent votes even in 2014, though it didn’t result in a single seat.

In the BJP camp, a chink in its armour is that till now it doesn’t seem to have a strong chief ministerial candidate. In 2014, the choice was easy — Narendra Modi against a discredited UPA and a Prime Minister seen to be powerless, having provided a listless government compared to his first term.

In the SP camp, a relatively younger Akhilesh is trying to break free from the shackles of caste and communal politics and present a modern face of development, but unfortunately the laptop-wielding young CM, who came to power with such a flourish in 2012, has not given any concrete results when it comes to progress in one of the most backward States.

Interesting times are ahead; can Bihar be repeated in UP? Will BJP repeat its spectacular performance of 2014? Can Congress rise from the ashes in its karmabhoomi ?

How UP votes in 2017 will give us a glimpse of how India will vote in 2019.

COMMENT NOW