Alliance signal from ground zero of India's electoral battle
Politics, so goes the old adage, is the art of the possible. More so when it is the election season in India. In the build-up to the parliamentary elections just about three months away, the most important political realignment took place with Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party headed by Akhilesh Yadav. Setting aside their fierce hostility of nearly a quarter of a century, they struck an alliance for the coming polls in Uttar Pradesh state, considered the ground zero of India's national poll battle because it sends the highest number (80) of members to the Lok Sabha. Hence, the popular view that the party or combination of parties that win in Uttar Pradesh gets to the half-way mark to rule India.
It is not the first time the two parties—the BSP with its base among Dalits and others at the bottom of caste ladder, and the SP with its support base among other socially backward castes, mainly Yadavs—have joined hands. They had done it successfully in 1993 in Uttar Pradesh state assembly polls and formed a coalition government before the alliance fell apart in June, 1995 following the beating up of Mayawati by SP workers in a guest house in Lucknow. That incident saw the two parties remaining sworn rivals in Uttar Pradesh till now. In politics, history at times has a strange way of repeating itself. About 25 years ago, it was Akhilesh's father and SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati's mentor and BSP founder Kanshi Ram who had scripted the alliance to counter the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Indian politics at the height of the Ram temple movement. And now, it was left to Mulayam's son and Kanshi Ram's protégé to firm up the alliance once again to take on the BJP.
The alliance aims at wooing back the votes of Dalits, Scheduled Castes, Yadavs and Muslims who together comprise about fifty percent of the electorate in Uttar Pradesh. The SP and the BSP are aware of the fact that a huge consolidation of votes cutting across castes in Uttar Pradesh had contributed to the BJP's securing a clear majority in parliamentary elections five years ago. An equally spectacular consolidation had powered the BJP to an unprecedented victory for the saffron party in the state assembly polls in March 2017. In 2014, the BJP bagged 72 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats and three years later, got 323 of the 404 assembly seats. Interestingly, the BJP secured 42 percent of vote share in Uttar Pradesh, equal to the combined vote share of the SP (20 percent) and the BSP (20 percent) in 2014. The SP and the BSP had fought the polls in 2014 separately and while the former managed just five seats, the latter drew a blank prompting an angry Mayawati to blame EVMs for her party's performance.
There is a general agreement that the SP-BSP alliance will prove a very tough challenge to the BJP in Uttar Pradesh in 2019. A back-of-the-envelope calculations by the Indian media projects the SP-BSP tie-up has the potential to bring down the BJP's tally of 72 parliamentary seats of 2014 by half this year. But electoral politics is not just about arithmetic. A lot will depend on how much the SP and the BSP can make their new-found alliance and the bonhomie between Akhilesh and Mayawati percolate to the grassroot workers of the two parties after years of animosity. No doubt, the two parties have the capability of transferring their votes in each other's kitties. A glimpse of this was available in two parliamentary bypolls in Uttar Pradesh last year when the alliance between the SP and the BSP ensured the defeat of the BJP. However, it will be quite a challenge to replicate the same camaraderie across the entire state given 25 years of deep-running hostility between the two regional outfits. The social groups represented by the SP and the BSP have conflicting economic interests, and consequent turf battles for supremacy had often resulted in violent clashes in the past. Secondly, the two parties have to work hard to select the constituencies they will fight based on their prospects and determine the winning chances of their candidates.
The SP-BSP alliance left out from its purview the Congress party which has already indicated that it is prepared to go it alone in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress had in the past a glue for votes across the caste hierarchy. So, on the face of it, the SP and the BSP and the Congress contesting separately ensures a split in anti-BJP votes. But there is a speculation that there is a tacit understanding between the Congress and the SP-BSP combine although there is not much available evidence on record to support such a line of thinking except that the Congress is contemplating installing a Brahmin as the head of its Uttar Pradesh unit ahead of the elections. That could be a signal to the upper castes, a section of which is said to be unhappy with the BJP. The Congress is also hoping that its recent victory in assembly polls in the three heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will woo back Muslim as well as backward castes votes. If the SP and the BSP can regain the core of their support bases and the Congress can make a dent in the upper caste votes which the BJP hopes to win through the recent legislation on ten percent quota for the economically weak among forward castes, it could spell trouble for the saffron party.
With the SP-BSP tie-up firmed up, the game of alliance-building across Indian states like Karnataka, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is either in place or in the processing of being finalised. What is noteworthy is, most of these alliance-making exercises have been confined to opposition parties. But it is the alliance saga and other political developments in Uttar Pradesh which, unlike in many other states, resonate in a bigger way.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent, The Daily Star.
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