Against all odds it appears, the will of the people of Uttar Pradesh has triumphed. The Modi-Shah juggernaut that started from Gujarat has finally been stopped in Uttar Pradesh. The astounding victory for the INDIA alliance with 46 seats has not only disrupted the Modi-Shah victory formula but also has an underlying message from descendants of Ram and Krishna for the duo from Gujarat.
The biggest shocker came from Ayodhya. The city of Lord Ram has spoken. By voting in power the 79-year-old veteran Dalit leader, Awadhesh Prasad of the INDIA Alliance, the people have turned Modi’s propaganda upside down. Modi was hoping the Ram Mandir will secure his position in Ayodhya and polarise Hindu votes all across the country, but ostensibly he failed even in Ayodhya. Real issues of no development, unemployment and inflation among the electorate had been deflected so far using jingoist propaganda. But the people cast their lot for change.
Not far from Ayodhya, Allahabad delivered another strong political message to Modi. UP’s political power-centre Allahabad which has given the country seven prime minsters, has voted in the Congress after exactly 40 years. The last time the Congress won it was in 1984. The candidate was Amitabh Bachhan. They say not just angry young men, but change in Allahabad often signals a larger political tectonic shift in the country.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Trusting ‘Modi’s guarantees’ for a decade, two parachute candidates were voted to power in 2014 and 2019. But this time, riding the wave of discontentment on the otherwise placid Sangam waters, the INDIA alliance candidate, Ujwal Raman Singh wrestled the constituency back for the Congress. The main reasons were ‘absent MPs’, lack of work and Modi’s and the local BJP leadership’s apathy towards the consistency.
Lakhimpur Kheri voters also dethroned minister of state for home affairs, Ajay Kumar Teni, stubbornly kept in the cabinet despite the incident of his son being involved in mowing down marching farmers, killing at least five. The anger against Teni had been brewing after reportedly a car in the minister’s convoy ran over farmers just walking down the road in the area in 2021. And the Sikh community after subsequent vilification from the BJP led-social media machine moved away from the BJP, taking with them farmers’ sympathies.
Smriti Irani also suffered a bruising defeat in Amethi against Congress party worker Kishori Lal Sharma, giving the constituency back to the Congress.
But why this shift, especially when Ram Mandir was made and Modi promised to be back with 400 plus seats?
Overdone influence
Narendra Modi may have been elected as an MP from UP for the third time consecutively, but his manoeuvres seem to have outlived their utility in Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps, he thought the state needed to be subdued and politically broken in, to exert total control over the people and resources of India’s largest state.
Since Modi-Shah have come to power, observers note that the number of Gujarati people and Gujarat-linked firms bagging major state contracts all the way from Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra has increased. This was an issue repeatedly highlighted in the Maharashtra campaign and while not that vocally here, it was deep undercurrent of resentment. You only have to take a look at major airports all across the country. From road construction to dairy operations, all seem to be “tilted towards Gujaratis”, as someone told me. One can search online the Central and state government contracts awarded between 2014 to 2019 reflect a pattern.
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Politically too, after destroying senior leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi, L.K. Advani and prominent chief ministers like Vasundhra Raje, Shivraj Chouhan and Raman Singh, Modi-Shah have revealed their hand. They didn’t even spare cabinet minsters, and the sudden dropping of ex-army chief V.K. Singh, and chucking out of other popular leaders like Narendra Singh Tomar, Harshvardhan and Radha Mohan Singh in the blink of an eye raised eyebrows and hackles.
Talking UP
Modi-Shah thought they could keep Yogi Adityanath under check without upsetting his voters or the local BJP and RSS cadre. Modi was no doubt anxious to convert Yogi’s voter base into his own, but this is where he faltered. Yogi, as the chief priest of Gorakhnath math, has his own base and network. Large sections of the electorate seemed visibly antagonised at how they perceived Modi-Shah treating Adityanath. The political isolation and powerlessness suffered by Adityanath, with talk of a Modi-Shah ‘parallel government’ in Lucknow, has resulted in major BJP supporting caste-groups like the Rajputs standing in opposition to a sense of Gujarati stranglehold over UP.
BJP candidates like Sangam Lal Gupta from Pratapgarh allegedly made demeaning references about Rajputs and Brahmins, and BJP ally, Apna Dal leader, Union minister and MP Anupriya Patel, didn’t mince words either when speaking against Rajput leaders and the community. This is supposed to have led to a big shift in the Pratapgarh, Allahabad, Macchlishahr and Kasuambhi seats. Many experts are also attributing a hidden hand of strongman Rajput leader from Pratapgarh Raja Bhaiya in delivering these constituencies back to the INDIA Alliance. He, just days before the polling, had declared he was “freeing up voters and everyone to make their own choices”.
The alleged tacit alliance between the BSP and BJP, which led to Mayawati dropping her own nephew Akash Anand, anointed as her successor just months ago, and changing Jaunpur and Basti candidates at the last minute, fanned suspicions about Mayawati’s political intent. Her voters have quietly moved away. The party has scored a duck, the vote share is down to about 9% and the party has not been able to shape outcomes in any of the 80 seats. Despite Mayawati’s helpful actions, whether intended or not, the BJP lost both the Basti and Jaunpur seat to INDIA Alliance. Chandra Shekhar Azad, now an MP from Nagina, contesting as an independent, has a chance to make something of this vacuum in Dalit politics in UP. Though presently, Akhilesh Yadav with an enlarged idea of the PDA (Picchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) is treading very carefully to keep Dalits onside on the progressive cause, something even his father and founder-leader of the Samajwadi Party failed to do in the early 1990s.
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In my own travels and stay in UP, it was clear that the Modi-Shah duo were about to get a shock. OBC and Dalit communities were showing signs of Modi-fatigue and were moving away from the BJP. The writing on the wall was clear that despite being from an OBC community, Narendra Modi had not anything for the OBCs.
Every person’s everyday issues of rapidly falling incomes, failed government programmes, inflation, unemployment, stray cattle causing havoc with crops, have not been addressed in the last decade. Constituencies like Kairana and Muzaffarnagar, which had been at the centre of communal politics, voted for INDIA Alliance. People in general appeared tired of communal propaganda and divisive politics.
Fear hurts progress
The fear threshold within the UP voter also appeared to have been peaking. People across districts were scared to air their opinions due to repercussions. In a political state like UP, this was a low. Never before had a political leader infused fear in everyday lives. UP voters voted against the fear and intimidation used by Modi-Shah to get their own way.
The last ten years of Modi’s rule, where he repeatedly said MPs were not important, vote for the lotus and vote for Modi, have crippled UP. Instead of UP emerging as a hotbed for industry, agriculture and prosperity, given its immense human resources, it remained a state with migrants, industrial progress thwarted and as shown by numbers, the distance between UP and states like Tamil Nadu has grown rapidly. UP, felt may there, was being primed for “an economic takeover by Gujaratis”. 2024 results are a powerful reminder for Modi, that the gateway to Delhi which passes through UP, is no longer smooth nor an open ride.
The PM appears to have finished his meditation in Kanniyakumari, but this quote out of the Gita may be useful for the PM to mediate on, “For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked and for the establishment of dharma, I (Krishna) come into being in every era,” so Modi ji, Lord Ram has already willed your defeat in Ayodhya. Do you really want to mess with Lord Krishna next?
