Has Countdown for BJP’s Exit from UP Govt Begun?

In 2017, Uttar Pradesh saw a landslide victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which got 312 seats in the 403-member Assembly and its allies got another 14 seats. The alliance – called the National Democratic Alliance or NDA – garnered nearly 42% of the vote share. The Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress alliance – a Mahagathbandhan (MGB) of sorts – managed just 54 seats and 28% vote share while the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) could get just 19 seats though it had a vote share of 22%. Clearly, BJP’s victory was decisive and monumental, the largest sweep in the state’s history. {See map and data below, from Newsclick’s special Election Page}

Can BJP’s huge vote share and even bigger seat majority in the UP Assembly get eroded so much as to fall below the half-way mark of 202? Surely this would need a seismic upheaval?

If you look at it purely in terms of arithmetic the answer is simple – a BSP-SP alliance would easily beat the BJP behemoth in vote shares and hence in seats. But life is not so simple. After the spectacular failure of the 2019 Lok Sabha election experiment of these two rivals coming together, they parted ways and are going to fight it out separately. So that trivial solution is out.

Swings based on real situation can upturn BJP

There is another possibility, and we will show that it is much more likely. This is moored in the undeniable fact that both BJP and BSP are losing their respective support bases and the SP-led alliance is gaining the most from their erosion.

Before unpacking the reasons why this is happening, let us look at a hypothetical situation to show that it doesn’t take much to upturn the BJP’s mountain of votes in UP. Let us assume that given a host of reasons BJP is no longer enjoying as much support as it had in 2017. Farmers, especially in Western UP, are deeply angry with the party, there is widespread discontent at the raging unemployment, price rise, mishandling of the COVID pandemic, neglect of minorities, backward castes and dalits, etc. So, they may lose about 4-5% of their vote share this time. 

BSP, too, is facing discontent due to its equivocation towards BJP, its dodgy role in various issues concerning minorities, and its failure to take up any of the economic issues that roiled the state in the past five years. Let’s assume that they too will lose around 4% of their vote share.

Since the SP has now aligned with the West UP based Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and also gathered a group of small caste-based parties (like the ones representing Rajbhars and Kurmis), and even managed to attract several influential BJP leaders from backward castes into its fold, it is fair to assume that the eroded base of both BJP and BSP will gravitate towards SP. So, what then will happen?

As shown in the map and data below, these swings away from BJP and BSP will be enough to make the BJP alliance lose as many as 117 seats, bringing their tally down to just 195, short of the majority mark. The SP alliance (dubbed MGB in the chart below) will gain 131 seats and reach a total tally of 193. Newsclick’s Election Page allows readers to interactively determine swings and see the results.

This is a hypothetical exercise just to show that fair and very reasonable assumptions based on the past five years of BJP rule and recent political developments can indeed upturn the BJP’s applecart and throw open the state to a fresh rule. It is not impossible for a party that has 42% of vote share and 80% of seats in the Assembly to lose in the next election. It all depends on how this government has performed, whether it has kept the people with it by delivering on its promises and whether it is seen as the best of choices available. 

Key factors working against BJP

In the past two-three months, BJP has been going all out to recover some of the lost ground. That is why the mind boggling governmental spending spree with Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing or inaugurating over Rs.1 lakh crore worth of projects, transferring Rs.1,000 to the accounts of each unorganised sector worker, releasing the PM Kisan instalment for income support to farmers and – in an unprecedented move – repealing the three farm laws that the farmers had been opposing for one year. The Yogi Adityanath government has announced various sops like tablets/smart phones to youth, extension of the additional food grains distribution scheme till March 2022, increase in widow pension from Rs.500 to Rs.1,000, etc. 

All this frenetic fire-fighting cannot, however, appease the people fully because of the economic crisis that has destroyed common people’s lives. Farmers are not satisfied with merely rolling back the three laws because even the existing support prices are not available to a majority of them. Farm labour wages have barely risen if inflation is taken into account. A part of the sugarcane dues have been cleared just months before the elections but not all. Compensation for crop damage in various extreme weather events has been paltry and much delayed. And, the stray cattle menace, created by the Yogi government‘s so-called cow-protection policies continues to haunt farmers. 

Another major economic issue is employment. Both Modi and Yogi – and the much tom-tommed ‘double engine’ – have starkly failed on the job creation front. Both had promised jobs in lakhs and crores whereas the brutal reality is that in UP, the number of employed persons has actually reduced in the past five years, according to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy or CMIE data.

The Yogi government has faced numerous widespread protests (reported by Newsclick) from various sections of employees because of non-payment of salaries even as the pandemic was storming through the state. These include government employees who were agitated at the new pension scheme, as well as various contract employees and even frontline health workers, such as doctors and anganwadi workers/helpers.

One of the important reasons for the disillusionment of large sections of people from Yogi’s rule , including the middle class, is its mismanagement of the pandemic. People remember the desperate search for oxygen cylinders in April-May 2021, the dearth of medicines, the vindictive and callous responses of the government toward needy people and, of course, the searing images of corpses floating in river Ganga.

The Caste Alliance Against BJP is Spawned by Economic Crisis

In the past few days three ministers and several MLAs of the outgoing Assembly have resigned from BJP and joined SP. This has dramatically challenged BJP’s carefully constructed image of taking along and uplifting these caste communities in its ‘development’ agenda – “sabka saath, sabka vikas”. The real reason behind this is also the deep and pervading economic crisis that is hitting these sections the most, because they are among the more vulnerable parts of society. They are either small/marginal farmers or landless labourers and the economic crisis has devastated them.

Meanwhile, the dalit base of BSP, as well as non-jatav dalits who had to some extent supported BJP, have become disillusioned with both. BSP is losing its support because people are unsure of where it stands vis-a-vis BJP. The BJP for its part has repeatedly been shown up as dithering on taking a just stand on dalit atrocities, besides being seen as anti-reservation, especially since it is a strong supporter of privatisation.

These, in short, are the forces that are now ranged against BJP, having deserted it after five years of bitter experience. BJP’s so called muscular policy against crime, too, has failed with wanton crime rampant. Its hostility toward the Muslim community and its high pitched Hindutva has only led the perception to grow that it is interested in opportunistically using religion to get votes and come to power.

The cards are thus stacked against the BJP government. The predictive scenario painted above gives an indication that the BJP citadel could fall because of its disastrous governance in the past five years