The key prize in India’s election
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be one of the world’s most populous. And this poverty-stricken northern melting pot of over 200 million people is the biggest prize in India’s election ending today.
Uttar Pradesh (UP) has 80 parliamentary seats, the most of any state, and at the 2014 election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept up 71 of them.
This helped give BJP a three-decade record of 282 seats in the 545-seat parliament to oust India’s grand old Congress party, which sunk to a record low of 44, just two of them in UP.
“To be in Delhi, you need to perform very well in UP,” Ashok Upadhyay, political scientist at Banaras Hindu University, told AFP.
Many analysts credit the BJP’s previous electoral success to a fragmented opposition and a massive shift of disparate caste groups towards Modi over an array of issues, including emotive religious appeals.
UP, which has given India nine prime ministers, lies at the centre of the country’s vast northern Hindi-speaking belt, home to around a third of India’s 1.3-billion population and which in 2014 formed the core of the BJP’s support.
But the landlocked region, roughly the size of Britain, is also a cauldron of religions and castes and in this election an unlikely anti-Modi alliance has been formed.
One part of it is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), headed by Mayawati, the formidable “Dalit Queen” whose championing of India’s lower castes helped her become UP chief minister four times.She has partnered with her former sworn foes the Samajwadi Party (SP), led by another former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, and the smaller Rashtriya Lok Dal party (RLD). Absent from the tie-up though is Congress.
“Our aim is to oust the BJP and for the entire opposition to be united,” Vandana Singh, spokeswoman for Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, told AFP.
The state’s chief minister is currently the BJP’s hardline Yogi Adityanath, a shaven-headed, saffron-robed Hindu monk whose uncompromising rhetoric has alienated many voters.
The BJP insists it is confident but experts say the ruling party knows it is going to lose support in UP.
As a result the party is aiming to make up for losses by picking up seats in north-eastern and eastern India, most notably in West Bengal where it faces another tough challenger in the hard-left Mamata Banerjee.
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