New Delhi: Powered by Akhilesh Yadav’s meticulous management of caste aspirations and burning livelihood issues, voters in Uttar Pradesh have delivered an embarrassing blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his lieutenant Adityanath, who have lost considerable popular support in the state that was billed by many to be the next Gujarat for the Sangh parivar.
In a remarkable turnaround, the INDIA bloc led by the Samajwadi Party won 43 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the key northern state. The BJP-dominated NDA, led and personified by the cult of Narendra Modi, has managed to win 36 seats. The BJP suffered a huge slump in its performance despite having four OBC-based parties for allies, running a high-pitch communal campaign triggering fear-mongering against Muslims, brow-beating the Opposition with muscle and state power and the double engines of Modi and Adityanath. Modi, though retaining his Varanasi seat, managed to win by a much-reduced margin of 1.52 lakh, as against his 2019 victory lead of 4.79 lakh.
The SP-Congress alliance, which focused on addressing livelihood concerns, safeguarding rights provided in the Constitution and increasing their social breadth among the marginalised Hindu communities, matched the BJP even in terms of popular support.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Given that the BJP enjoys a full-majority government in Uttar Pradesh since 2017 and has steamrolled the Opposition in consecutive Lok Sabha elections, 2014 and 2019, the figures in 2024 are nothing less than extraordinary, going beyond all expectations of the Opposition, which had just managed to win 16 seats in 2019.
As it stands on Wednesday morning, the INDIA bloc has mustered a vote share of 43.52% – 33.59% for the SP, 9.46% for the Congress and 0.47% for the Trinamool Congress, which contested in Bhadohi. What’s notable is that the SP only contested 62 seats.
The BJP and its allies, RLD, Apna Dal (Soneylal) and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, are expected to get a vote share of above 42%. That would be around 9% short of what the BJP had got in the last election.
The BJP, which contested 75 out of the 80 seats, secured a vote share of 41.37%, a decisive drop of 8.6% from 2019, when it had on its own bagged an unassailable 49.98% of the votes.
While the final figures are still awaited, the numbers indicate a comprehensive political defeat for the BJP in the state, which has since Independence played a big role in deciding who gets to rule the country.
In 2014, Modi chose Varanasi to propel himself to national relevance and in 2019, he continued to dominate the political landscape of the state, on the back of a hyper-nationalist Hindutva-driven campaign promising deliverables to the poor and marginalised Hindus.
In this election, there was no trick that the BJP did not try. From appeasing Hindus to demonising Muslims with conspiracy theories about Opposition plans to provide them reservations after snatching the share of Dalits and OBCs, the BJP made all attempts to polarise Hindus in its favour. The construction of the Ram Mandir – at the site where the Babri Masjid once stood – was its calling card.
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However, the raging unemployment, crippling inflation, unpopular schemes such as Agniveer and the BJP’s sheer arrogance and over-reliance on luring voters through Hindu cultural nationalism and polarising rhetoric proved to be its undoing.
The SP, which has made huge gains in the 2022 assembly election, made an astonishing jump this time, driven by Akhilesh’s slogan of ‘Pichda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak’. The call to unite OBCs, Dalits and Muslims seems to have resonated with voters across the state, as the SP made gains in several regions. The SP’s design to have invested more on OBC and Dalits candidates proved to be a masterstroke, as the party reaped the benefits in seats with considerable population of these communities.
As reported by The Wire, in this election, the SP had fielded more OBCs than the BJP-combine. Moreover, by fielding only five Yadavs, the party sent positive signals to the numerically dominant non-Yadav OBCs and also appealed to large chunks of Dalits voters by promising to safeguard reservations and the Constitution.
The INDIA bloc won some difficult seats in west Uttar Pradesh and Rohilkhand, where it faced the combined might of the BJP and RLD. Here, the Opposition won Saharanpur, Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Moradabad, Rampur, Sambhal, Budaun, Aonla and Etah.
By defeating Rajveer Singh alias Raju Bhaiya, the son of former chief minister Kalyan Singh, who was a poster boy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS’s) Hindutva movement among the OBCs and who oversaw the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the SP’s Devesh Shakya secured a major upset.
The five Yadavs from the late Mulayam Singh Yadav’s family led by Akhilesh Yadav himself won their respective seats — Kannauj, Budaun, Firozabad, Azamgarh and Mainpuri.
The SP also made inroads in the drought-ridden Bundelkhand region, dominated by OBCs and Dalits, winning Jalaun, Banda and Hamirpur. The BJP has won only one seat here, Jhansi.
The INDIA bloc also made gains in the heart of the state in and around Awadh, winning the difficult seats of Kheri, Dhaurahra and Mohanlalganj. In Kheri, the SP defeated the controversial Union minister Ajay Misra Teni while in Mohanlalganj another Union minister, Kaushal Kishore, tasted defeat at the hands of veteran Pasi Dali leader R.K. Chaudhary, who was inducted in the SP by Akhilesh Yadav as part of his attempts to broaden his party’s social reach. Seven Union ministers, including Kishore and Teni, were defeated in the election, signalling a blow to Modi.
The biggest upset, however, came in Amethi, where Modi-favoured minister Smriti Irani was shown the door by K.L. Sharma, a Gandhi-family loyalist. Union minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti lost in Fatehpur to the SP’s Naresh Uttam Patel, a Kurmi OBC who was till recently the SP’s state president. In Muzaffarnagar, the BJP’s Sanjeev Balyan lost to another Jat leader Harendra Malik of the SP. Union minister Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma also lost in Jalaun.
Major chunks of the Opposition’s gains came in east and central east UP. The Opposition won 25 seats there. In south and central east UP, the BJP lost all seats barring Varanasi, Phulpur, Mirzapur and Bhadohi.
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The BJP could win Gorakhpur, Adityanath’s bastion, by a margin of only one lakh, speaking volumes about the drastic shift in popularity in the state. In 2019, the BJP’s Ravi Kishan, a Bhojpuri actor, had won Gorakhpur by more than three lakh votes. What’s also incredible is that while in 2019, Kishan had secured 7.17 lakh votes, in 2014 his actual votes reduced to 5.85 lakh, while the Opposition’s climbed from 4.15 lakh to 4.80 lakh in the last five years.
The Congress also made a comeback in UP, as it won six out of the 17 seats it contested — Sitapur, Saharanpur, Rae Bareli, Amethi, Barabanki and Allahabad. The last time it won Allahabad, a prestigious seat associated with the forefathers of the Congress party, was in 1984, when its candidate was Amitabh Bachchan.
Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was relegated to a distant third place, with zero seats and a reduced vote share of 9.39%, officially rendering the party a marginal force in the state where it ruled with a full majority in 2007.
