UP: Thumbs Down for Congress and Rahul

To understand what has happened, perhaps one needs to reverse the position in Uttar Pradesh by standing the results on their head as it were.

 

What would have happened if the Congress had secured the 100 seats it had been projecting through a pliable media?

 

The drums would have started beating. Crowds would have been brought to gather outside the residence of Congress President Sonia Gandhi, hailing the results as the victory of Rahul Gandhi and of course his mother and sister. The unfortunate brother-in-law was sent out of Amethi after a brief appearance lest he queer the pitch for the Nehru-Gandhi clan’s “strategy” to deliver Uttar Pradesh to the party. The spokespersons would have been out in all their numbers praising Rahul Gandhi for his brilliant campaign, for his charisma, for his strategy directed at bringing back the Brahmins, the Muslims and the Dalits back into the Congress fold, of the victory of the young over the old with issues such as spiraling prices, inflation, deep corruption being laid to rest in the process.

 

Now that the Congress has been virtually routed in Uttar Pradesh, and indeed in the other states as well where it failed to make a comeback, the grim faces of the Congress leaders say it all. There is the valiant UPCC president Rita Bahugana standing first in line to pick up the blame by maintaining that Rahul Gandhi conducted a brilliant campaign, and the defeat was because of the candidate and the party organization. Salman Khursheed whose wife lost despite his efforts to get in the Muslim vote by promising reservations, spoke of ‘haar and jeet’ as being part of politics, and there could be no blame attached to the Congress scion. No mention of the ‘strategy’ that failed, the ‘charisma’ that failed to attract, and the ‘leadership’ that could not build an effective and credible organization in the state.

 

The Congress failed as it was unable to attract any single vote bank. It worked on the Dalits and the Muslims in the hope that the upper castes would follow. The Dalits and in particular the Jatav’s still unsure and distrustful of the Congress and its high voltage campaign, consolidated behind BSP leader Mayawati. The Muslims were not convinced despite the promises of reservation as like the Dalits, development for them lies through justice, rights and equality and not just stand alone promises of employment and education. The distrust in the Congress because of the Batla House incident and the large scale arrests of Muslim youth in states like Maharashtra was palpable.The upper castes stayed away as they did not want to vote for a losing horse, and besides the Salman Khursheed and Digvijay Singh kind of statements were seen as over pandering to the minorities. So as always the Congress did not gain one for the other, and in the process lost all.

 

It was clear from the onset that BSP leader Mayawati’s social engineering had collapsed. And that the Muslim and Brahmin vote that had brought her to absolute power in the last elections was fleeing. It did not need a poll to determine that she would lose at least a hundred seats in the process, even with the consolidation of the Jatav as well as sections of the other Dalit vote. Corruption had worked against her, as well as an arrogance that made her indifferent to the interests and needs of the Brahmins and Muslims who had reposed faith in her. All over UP the Muslims were clear, “she is not interested in us at all, she is only building monuments for herself.’” The old tactics of fielding a record number of Muslim and Brahmin candidates on the BSP ticket did not work, as the wily UP electorate has seen through these kind of sops and was not willing to be fooled again.

 

The BJP did not fare well as the fractious organisation did not convince the voter. The local leaders did not work for the party because ‘authoritarian’ decisions that they felt had been ‘imposed’ on the state by the central leadership. Its old mantra of communalism and Ayodhya was totally unappealing to the new electorate looking for progress and development. The Kushwaha factor worked against the party, and it was unable to gain anything by sending a rather tired Uma Bharti to the state that she has not really visited at length after the Ayodhya days when the Babri masjid was demolished. The party gained a few seats from areas where there were too many political parties vying for the Muslim vote, but by and large it cannot claim the full support of any one vote bank.

 

The Samajwadi party, on the other hand, created a wave that was not discernible to the untrained eye but very clear to those acquainted with UP politics by the time the last ballot box was locked. In fact only Mulayam Singh had actually set in motion a deliberate strategy for UP. First, he got rid of Kalyan Singh. This along with the exit of Amar Singh proved to be a major relief for the voters, with the Muslims in particular sitting up to look at the SP once again. He then at the initial stages of the campaign spoke of reservation for Muslims and linked it to development at all levels. He spoke more about his party and less about others. He let it be known midway through the campaign that the SP could ally with the Congress after the results to form the government, to bring in a few floating Muslim and other votes and to cut into any upper caste vote that the Congress could secure. And he used his trump card, his son Akhilesh Yadav to complete the process of collecting the votes.

 

Akhilesh started his campaign long before the Delhi media even knew his name. He went out into the villages on his cycle, connecting with the people, and charming them with his affable, simple personality. He does not have the brashness of his father, he speaks direct, he does not promise the moon, and his quiet language clearly convinced the voters to look at the Samajwadi party with some seriousness. It is clear that the majority has not come with just a simple Yadav-Muslim combination but has stretched to include a good and healthy mix of the people of UP. The Samajwadi party always has had levels of Rajput and other backward caste support that came together as well. Sections of the Brahmin also voted for the party in a bid to defeat the BSP, and in the realization that the BJP was not covering any ground in the state. Besides Akhilesh Yadav’s calculated move to keep DP Yadav away from the party assuaged some concerns about a return of the ‘goon raj.’

 

A highly political election, well fought by the Samajwadi party and the BSP, the first with strategy, the second with the belief that it was still popular. The Congress and the BJP came out the losers, with their campaign unable to recognize the emerging federal character of the masses.