Abhinav Prakash Singh

The January 12 announcement of the seat-sharing agreement between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) has put an end to all speculations regarding the fate of this unlikely alliance in run up to the 2019 general elections. The coming together of the two major regional parties has changed the electoral dynamics and has put the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the back foot apart from reminding the Congress of its enduring irrelevance in the Gangetic belt.

There is no doubt that coming together of these two parties representing major social constituencies has seriously dented the chances of the BJP repeating its stellar performance in Uttar Pradesh. Going by the sheer arithmetic of the alliance, the BJP may find it tough to cross the tally of 20 seats (of the 80 in UP).

However, there are three underlying assumptions to this scenario; first, is that the SP represents the Other Backward Caste (OBC) votes and the BSP the Dalit communities; second, they will be able to consolidate various castes under these categories; and, third, the SP and the BSP will be able to transfer votes to each other’s candidates. It is here that things get complicated.

The SP is largely a party of the Yadavs of the Etawah-Mainpuri belt, while the BSP is primarily a party of the Jatavs of the Agra belt. An important reason of their decline has been the resentment of the non-Yadav and non-Jatav castes against their marginalisation in the party and state patronage whenever the SP or the BSP was in power. In fact, this was a major factor behind the en mass shift of these castes to the BJP fold in the 2014 Lok Sabha and the 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections.

The SP-BSP alliance is being seen as the alliance of the Yadavs & Jatavs of the western UP to reclaim their lost power under the BJP government. This has not only confused the other castes but has also frightened some of the weaker castes who now worry about the future of their representation in legislature and government machinery. The simplistic assumption that the SP-BSP represent all the Dalit and OBC castes ignores the diversity and heterogeneity of the caste assertion on the ground where each caste is striving for greater political representation.

Among the Dalits, the Pasi are the second-largest caste in UP but have resolutely voted for the SP and later the BJP but never for the BSP after the initial days of the BSP movement. The breakup was complete after the demise of the Kanshiram when Mayawati started running her party like a fiefdom of her caste men.

Similarly, the OBC castes such as the Kushwahas and the Kurmis have steered clear of the SP after failing to prevent the Yadav dominance of the party. Therefore, to assume that SP-BSP alliance will be able to rally various castes behind its umbrella is not a very realistic scenario.

That said, what is making it more of a possibility is that the BJP has messed up the basic social equation in the state. The government and administration has become dominated by the upper-cates with the Thakurs and the Brahmins cornering all the state patronage. There is not even an influential Dalit or OBC leader in the UP Cabinet today. No important portfolio is being handled by any Dalit minister. Both the Jatav and the Pasi have been side-lined leading to weakening of the pro-BJP Dalit consolidation of the past five years.

Top administrative posts, posts of vice-chancellors, posts in commissions, etc. are going almost exclusively to the upper-castes with the Thakurs and the Brahmins fighting with each other for the greater share of the same. This lack of basic statecraft and not the SP-BSP alliance may come to haunt the BJP in the 2019 elections.

The issue of the decimation of the reservations by implementing a fraudulent 13-point roster system, via the judicial route, at the same time when the BJP has gone out of its way to provide reservation to the upper-caste, via EWS category, is leading to strengthening of the perception that the BJP remains anti-SC/ST/OBC reservation. The dilly-dally attitude of the BJP government at the Centre, especially that of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), has damaged the party while the leadership has deluded itself into believing that it’s the matter of only few thousand seats in colleges and universities.

It is clear that the opposition will make 2019 an issue of defending the SC/ST/OBC reservations and falling recruitment in the government jobs. The BJP will find it tough to defend its record on both the issues. The perception has gained foothold among the Dalits that the BJP is destroying the avenues of their socio-economic mobility, and the party has done little to contest this narrative.

The BJP can now only rely on the upper-caste consolidation behind it but even that may very well be threatened with the entry of the Priyanka Gandhi, which may attract the traditional Brahmin support base of the Congress. It is clear that the BJP leadership has realised this and is trying to focus on the beneficiaries of the massive pro-poor policies it has implemented in the past five years, such as the Ujjwala scheme, Swaccha Bharat, Ayushman Bharat, rural electrification, Mudra, etc.

It is hoping that the poor and the neo-middle class mobilisation may counter the mobilisation on the basis of caste. The national party is also hoping that the cadre of the SP and the BSP may find it difficult to vote for the candidates of the party which has been its main rival for decades.

Also, there is a less discussed but important regional factor — both the SP and the BSP are parties rooted in the western UP, while the BJP has tried to cultivate the Purvanchal in the past five years by undertaking massive infrastructural work in the neglected region. Even both the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister belong to the region.

Will the BJP pay the price of failing to stop the free run of the upper-caste lobbies or will it succeed in damage control by shifting the narrative away from the caste? Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, as of today, what is sure is that its seat tally is all set to fall drastically.

Abhinav Prakash Singh is assistant professor, Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, Delhi. Views are personal.

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