New Delhi: Not only did the Bharatiya Janata Party nose-dive hard in Uttar Pradesh, most of its allies too did not fare as well as they had expected. The BJP contested the 2024 Lok Sabha election with four formal allies – Rashtriya Lok Dal in the West, and the Nishad Party, Apna Dal (Soneylal) and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party in Purvanchal. All four parties command a support base among Other Backward Classes, namely Jats, Nishads, Kurmis and Rajbhars. Their support had bolstered the BJP’s anti-Yadav OBC politics.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The BJP’s allies contested on five out of the 80 seats in UP. Chaudhary Jayant Singh’s RLD, which switched sides from the opposition to the ruling coalition just ahead of the election, won both the seats it contested – Baghpat and Bijnor. RLD’s Rajkumar Sangwan won in Baghpat by 1.59 lakh votes while in Bijnor, the party’s sitting MLA Chandan Chauhan won by 37,508 votes defeating the SP’s Deepak Saini.
The RLD had drawn a blank in the last two Lok Sabha elections. In 2019, even when it contested three seats as part of the SP-BSP mahagathbandhan or grand alliance, it failed to score. While the BJP could not reap the full benefit of its alliance with the RLD, losing in key west UP seats Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, the latter has benefitted from the alliance.
Since 2014, the BJP’s constant ally in UP has been the Anupriya Patel-led Apna Dal (S). Patel is a minister in the Narendra Modi government and her husband Ashish Patel is a cabinet minister in the government run by Adityanath in the state.
The Apna Dal (S), which won two seats in both the 2014 and 2019 elections, managed to win only one seat this election. Party leader Anupriya Patel won her seat Mirzapur, which abuts Varanasi, by a thin margin of 37,810 votes and received just 42.67% of the votes as against the 53.3% she had cornered in 2019.
Her party, which relies heavily on the support of the agrarian Kurmi community, however, lost the second seat it contested on its symbol, the backward constituency of Robertsganj. The SP’s candidate Chotelal Kharwar defeated the AD (S) candidate Rinki Kol by a margin of 1.29 lakh votes. In 2019, the AD (S) had won the seat by over 54,000 votes.
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In Sant Kabir Nagar, the sitting BJP MP Praveen Nishad, the son of Nishad Party president and cabinet minister Sanjay Nishad, lost. Praveen Nishad, though associated with the Nishad Party, was contesting on a BJP symbol yet again as part of seat-sharing understanding. He was defeated by former MLA Laxmikant Nishad, the SP’s candidate, by over 92,000 votes.
The most embarrassing defeat for those among the BJP’s allies, however, came in Ghosi in East UP. Rajeev Rai of the SP defeated Arvind Rajbhar, the son of Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party chief Om Prakash Rajbhar, by 1.62 lakh votes. Om Prakash Rajbhar, who had returned to the NDA after fighting the 2022 assembly election as part of an SP-led alliance, paid the cost of his doubtful allegiance, inconsistent politics and sacrificing the interests of his community for power.
Rajbhar, who had promised his community that he would lobby with the BJP to divide the 27% OBC quota in the state, to the benefit of most-backward communities such as his, later changed tack to assuring them that he would get his community recognized as a Scheduled Tribe. However, none of those promises ever came true, even though he was nominated as a cabinet minister in the Adityanath government.
The same criticism stands true for Nishad Party chief Sanjay Nishad who had promised his community that he would convince the BJP at the Centre to include rivering OBC communities in the Scheduled Caste category. However, none of that ever happened.
Read all of The Wire’s reporting and analysis of the 2024 election results here.
