Although Uttar Pradesh assembly election 2022 is eight months away, we can already see political parties using every trick up their sleeve to create waves to manipulate the most populated state. One month back, we saw perverted progressive news channels showing the UP government in poor light when unfortunately some corpses were found in Ganga river. According to the news channels, the Yogi administration was trying to hide the exact number of COVID-19 deaths so they were dumping the corpses which came afloat in the river Ganga. However, this propaganda was soon busted when two persons were arrested after a video of a man in PPE kit throwing body into river surfaced.
No evidence has been provided by the opposition parties including SP, INC and others. This is just one of the examples of how desperate opponents are to wrest power from the development-oriented Yogi government. UP, being the largest state in terms of population, is also the state with the most number of the Member of Parliaments (MP), 80 out of a total 543 in the country. This makes it the most important state to win if any political party aims to come into power in the Center. Quite naturally, it has the highest number of assembly seats, too, in the country i.e. 403. In 2017 Assembly Elections, BJP had startled the political pundits by winning a mammoth 312 seats. A historic win!
After the surprisingly good performance of BJP in the West Bengal elections, the question is - Can BJP repeat its unprecedented win in UP this time? Or will it fall short of a majority? Although there are numerous factors that would affect Uttar Pradesh elections, we will talk about one major factor in every part of this series.
In this part, we will discuss the caste based politics in the state.
Quite similar to its neighbour state Bihar, Uttar Pradesh is notorious for caste based voting. It is unfortunate that people, even after seven decades of independence, are trapped in caste based politics but it is the ugly truth. BJP managed to garner a colossal 312 seats, almost 80% of them, a tough nut to crack. It won’t be any easier this time. There are several reasons behind that. The first one includes a false narrative of “Thakur Versus Brahmin” being built by the opponents for the last one year.
Ever since Yogi Adityanath became CM, he has taken strict action against criminals irrespective of the caste and religion of the person.
As a part of his mission to make UP crime free, Yogi has given a free hand to UP Police in order to solve criminal cases while maintaining law and order situation in the state. This is the reason why we may see a hike in the number of criminal reports, encounters, etc. It gave an opportunity to some political parties to spread rumors and create tension between the castes based on the increased criminal activities. For instance, when a wanted criminal Vikas Dubey was charged with the cold blood murder of several UP Police personnels and later he died in an encounter, SP blamed Yogi administration of targeting Brahmin community in the state. Several media outlets portrayed Yogi favouring people from Thakur community.
The reality is BJP does rely on Hindu majority vote base that includes Brahmin and Thakur and trader community ‘Vaishya’. The last assembly election was unprecedented as BJP was successful in winning over Dalit voters, which originally is a vote bank of BSP. This was evident from BSP’s loss of 61 seats in 2017 assembly elections as well. On the other hand, it also managed to break Yadav votes from the Muslim-Yadav cocktail of SP which was evident from the loss of SP’s 177 seats. BJP wooed the Jat voters from the western parts of the state and had won all of the Jat-dominated assembly seats in Muzaffarnagar district.
Will these communities continue to support and vote for BJP during the 2022 elections? Well, there are rumours that the Brahmin community is not satisfied by the state leadership. It is likely that in the coming days, we can see a reshuffle in Yogi’s team and there might be more representation of ministers from the Brahmin community so that their alleged dissatisfaction could be solved. On the other hand, a fraction of the Jat community has expressed its displeasure on the farm bill. It is a wait and watch game right now; farmer leader Rakesh Tikait, who hails from the Jat dominated region of UP, will he have any effect on the Jat community?
Talking about the Yadav community, they are going to play a crucial and interesting role as last time they voted without making any noise. The massive number of seats that BJP got last time had a major contribution from the Yadav community. The political pundits were baffled to see the loss of SP’s 177 seats all thanks to the Yadav community. The community has been a significant vote bank of SP which forms 15% of the state’s population. This will be interesting to see if BJP will be able to retain the community this time or not. So far, the community is silent and both BJP and SP will be looking forward to wooing them.
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