The peasant politics of the Gangetic plains offers limitless opportunities with no compulsions of consistency to its practitioners, who call themselves socialists for want of any better label. Looking eastwards at the stupendous victory of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav too suddenly wants a Bihar-like Grand Alliance for the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.Akhilesh seems to have forgotten that his father was the prime villain who broke a national-level Grand Alliance.In April this year, six parties had come together to merge and form a single Janata Parivar entity with Mulayam Singh as its chief. His Samajwadi Party , Nitish’s Janata Dal (United), Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular) and Samajwadi Janata Party founded by the former PM, Chandrashekhar, had all come together to fight the Bihar polls jointly.But in September as the Bihar polls were hotting up, Mulayam Singh walked out of this alliance. The SP was touted as one of the five important vote katuas or vote splitters of Bihar. Unfortunately, it just got swept off in the Nitish-Lalu deluge without winning a single seat or helping to split Yadav or Muslim votes.Now, after the outstanding victory of the Grand Alliance in Bihar, there are people who believe that a similar alliance in UP between the BSP and the Congress might end up in a similar result. Last time when the Congress and the BSP teamed up in 1996 for an assembly election, the results were not particularly helpful.But things could change this time around. In the 2012 assembly polls, the vote share of BSP was 25.9 per cent and that of Congress was 11.7 per cent and together these two parties were ahead of the SP and even SP and BJP put together. SP’s vote share of 29.1 per cent fetched them the winning tally of 224. The BJP’s vote share was a mere 15 per cent.The real Modi wave was visible in Uttar Pradesh when his party’s vote share surged from 15 per cent in 2012 assembly polls to 42.6 per cent in 2014 Lok Sabha polls. But with the wave ebbing and the party returning to its pre-Lok Sabha situation in Delhi and Bihar, any attempt at a prepoll alliance in UP could have a big impact.The numbers are stark: at the peak of the Modi wave, the BJP had a vote share of 46.6 per cent in Delhi and 29.9 per cent in Bihar in 2014. Just a year later, the BJP lost 14.5 per cent to hit 32.1 per cent in Delhi and in Bihar the vote share came down by 5.4 per cent to 24.5 per cent. Interestingly, in Bihar assembly polls the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), that is, the BJP and its three allies had a combined vote share similar to their performance in 2014 but the big difference was made by the alliance of all the other big parties who together scored 41.9 per cent.Now, if the BJP settles somewhere between 15 per cent and 42 per cent in the next UP polls, a combination of two parties can probably wrest power in the state. The BSP had suffered a huge set back in 2014 with all its candidates losing the Lok Sabha polls. But its votes share was still around 20 per cent. That is, even at its worst moment, the BSP held on to its core 20 per cent Dalit voters of the state.Something similar to what Lalu Yadav did in Bihar and built on afterwards for the assembly polls. That is, from a peak of 30.43 per cent during the 2007 assembly polls, Mayawati ’s party lost about 5 per cent votes in the next assembly polls and another 5 per cent two years later during the Lok Sabha polls.So, if the BJP scales down from the peak of 42.6 per cent as has already happened in Delhi and Bihar, the BSP has a fair chance of returning to power if it ties up with one of the other contenders.Whatever Akhilesh may promise, it is highly unlikely for the BSP to have an alliance with the SP because their earlier alliance experiment in 1993 ended in disaster and Mayawati believes that the 1995 Lucknow guest house incident — when a frenzied mob tried to break open the door of her room and threatened to kill her — was a physical attack aimed at her by the SP leadership. Also, unlike Nitish and Lalu there was no love lost between Mayawati and the Yadav clan ever. Each one leads antithetical forces on the ground and wouldn’t want to strengthen the other, particularly when Mayawati sees a revival of her fortunes after the local body polls.In 2007, the Brahmins had decisively shifted their allegiance towards Mayawati to put an end to the Yadav-Thakur rule of the SP. Now, even if the Brahmin community as a whole does not switch towards the BSP, a junior partner that can bring in about 10 per cent votes can help the BSP defeat the SP and that is where the Congress can become an effective tool for Mayawati.Also, both the BSP and the Congress are wary of Mulayam Singh because of his track record.He first became CM in 1989 as a Janata Dal leader with the help of the BJP. He then turned against the BJP becoming Maulana Mulayam, the champion of Muslims and the protector of the Babri Masjid. But in April 1999 he helped the BJP by refusing to align with the Congress, when the 13-month Vajpayee government was brought down. Soon, he was rewarded with a government in Lucknow in August 2003 by the BJP.Another imponderable in this equation is the Muslim vote. The Muslims are expected to gravitate towards the BSP and the Congress if they strike a pre-poll alliance. The SP knows this well and that is why Akhilesh is talking about a Grand Alliance two months after his father wrecked one. Worse, the SP’s credibility too is in tatters. The Dadri lynching happened under Akhilesh’s watch like a poll time sequel to the Muzaffarnagar riots. The SP has thrived on squeezing the votes out of a fearful community that lives under the shadow of riots but to stay relevant in 2017, SP will have to cast a wider net.