UP MLC poll results: Time for introspection for both BJP and SP

Earlier this week, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the polls held for filling 36 vacancies in the Upper House of the state assembly, the Vidhan Parishad. The symbolism of BJP’s ‘double engine ki sarkar’, so far a descriptor for simultaneous saffron rule at the Centre and in the state, has now been replicated within the UP legislature too.

The BJP’s win on 33 of the 36 legislative council seats gives the party a majority in both Houses of the state assembly, something no ruling party in UP had achieved in recent decades. The BJP now has 66 seats in the Vidhan Parishad, a massive improvement over the seven council seats it had when Yogi first became the state’s chief minister in March 2017.

Understandably, the BJP has gone to town projecting the victory as another historic win; a resounding endorsement of faith in the party and in Yogi Adityanath. Yet, beneath the advertised euphoria there are also some ominous signs for the BJP and its two competing Hindutva mascots –Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Adityanath — as well as for Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which drew a blank in the MLC polls despite putting up an impressive fight against the saffron front in the assembly polls held just a month back.

Bitter victory for the BJP

Purely in numeric terms, the MLC poll results should have been reason for unqualified jubilation within the BJP camp. The Electoral College for the biennial MLC polls comprises of village pradhans, members and chairpersons of block development councils, members and chairpersons of zila parishads, corporators in urban areas, MLAs, and MPs.

While the BJP had returned to power in the state in March, the SP-led alliance had succeeded in reducing the party’s 313-seat majority of the 2017 assembly polls to a 255-seat victory in the 403-member assembly. The SP had won 111 seats, a massive jump from its 47-seat tally of 2017. Similarly, in the gram pradhan and zila parishad polls held across the state last year, the BJP had lost several seats to its political rivals.

Thus, the success of the BJP in wresting 33 of the 36 MLC seats – including nine seats where its candidates won unopposed – showed that it was already reversing the electoral setbacks suffered since last year.

However, as results for the MLC polls were announced, on Tuesday (April 12), discussions in Lucknow’s power corridors weren’t about the 33 seats that the BJP won but over the three seats that the party lost and the antecedents of these three newly elected MLCs.

The biggest shocker for the BJP came in Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Narendra Modi. The BJP didn’t just lose the Varanasi council seat to independent candidate Annapurna Singh, wife of jailed don Brijesh Singh, but its nominee, Sudama Patel, finished a distant third in the race. While Annapurna secured 4,234 votes, the Samajwadi Party candidate Umesh Yadav cornered 345 votes and Patel finished with a humiliating 170 votes.

Since the results, Patel has been alleging sabotage by a section of BJP leaders, claiming that his party colleagues surrendered before the muscle and money power of Brijesh Singh, who incidentally is imprisoned don Mukhtar Ansari’s beta noire.

The second MLC seat that slipped out of the BJP’s grasp was Azamgarh-Mau. The seat was won by Vikrant Singh ‘Rishu’, son of BJP rebel Yashwant Singh. Yashwant Singh had been an MLC for two decades and had demanded a BJP ticket for his son this time. When the BJP refused, he made his son contest as an independent against the BJP’s Arunkant Yadav, son of another mafia don-turned-politician Ramakant Yadav. For his defiance, Yashwant Singh was expelled from the BJP for six years but the poll result proved the expulsion didn’t damage his political clout.

Interestingly, former MLC Rakesh Kumar Yadav ‘Guddu’, the SP candidate from Azamgarh-Mau, finished third in the contest. The jolt for Akhilesh Yadav would have been as big as that for the BJP since the SP had swept the Azamgarh district in the recently concluded assembly polls.

The third MLC seat that the BJP lost was Pratapgarh. Here Akshay Pratap Singh alias ‘Gopalji’, a close associate and relative of yet another mafia don, Kunda MLA and former minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh ‘Raja Bhaiya’, was the winner. Gopalji has won the Pratapgarh legislative council seat for a record fifth term despite being sentenced to seven years imprisonment by a special court in March after being found guilty on charges of obtaining an arms license through cheating and forgery.

Wins cast(e) in crime

There are two significant aspects about the BJP’s loss on the three seats. The victors – all independent candidates – have direct links to the world of crime and belong to the same caste – Thakurs (Rajputs) – as Chief Minister Adityanath.

Both these facets are important in their own way. The BJP had made much song and dance about Yogi’s success in cracking down on crime and criminals during the party’s shrill assembly poll campaign in February-March.

In a state traditionally infamous for its high crime rates, the BJP had sought to deify Yogi as ‘Bulldozer Baba’, the saffron-clad CM who had ended the free run of organized crime cartels as well as petty criminals through his supposedly no-compromise attitude on maintaining law and order. In contrast, the BJP’s political rivals and activist groups claimed that while Yogi may have acted strongly – often unconstitutionally – against alleged criminals who were Brahmins, Yadavs or Muslims, he had spared all Thakurs involved in criminal acts.

The MLC results strengthen the impression that criminals from Yogi’s Thakur community were thriving under his rule, winning elections – themselves or through proxies – despite being jailed or tried for several crimes.

Further, at least two of the three independent winners – Annapurna Singh and Vikrant Singh Rishu – are related to leaders who share a personal rapport with Adityanath. There has been much speculation within the BJP that Yogi tacitly backed Annapurna and Rishu’s election campaigns against the official BJP nominee – something that the CM has been accused of on several past occasions too when his loyalists were denied tickets by the BJP.

Interestingly, 10 of the BJP’s winning MLC candidates are also Thakurs. As such, on the 36 MLC seats that saw polls, 13 elected Thakur candidates (10 BJP, three independents).

Bumpy road for Akhilesh

The MLC poll losses on the three important seats may or may not trigger any rumblings within the BJP but for SP’s Akhilesh Yadav, who emerged as Yogi’s principal challengers in the assembly polls, there’s much to introspect.

The SP drew a complete blank in the MLC polls. Notable among its losers were Akhilesh Yadav’s close aide and party spokesperson Sunil Kumar Sajan and Dr Kafeel Khan, bitter Adityanath-critic since the BRD Medical College oxygen shortage tragedy of 2017 for which he was jailed on trumped up charges. Sajan lost the MLC polls from the Lucknow-Unnao seat while Khan lost the Kushinagar-Deoria.

The electoral race for the MLC seats had begun with an embarrassment for Akhilesh as nine outgoing MLCs of the SP had moved to the BJP on the eve of the Vidhan Sabha elections. Five of them had been fielded by the BJP as its candidates when the MLC polls were announced. Despite projecting a revival of its political aggression and conviction to keep the Adityanath government on its toes until last month, the MLC polls showed that the SP, perhaps, had begun to slide into inertia already.

The BJP won nine of the 36 MLC seats unopposed primarily because nomination papers of SP candidates were either rejected on flimsy grounds, or worse, the SP candidates decided to “withdraw” their nominations at the last minute. This happened despite Yadav moving his political base back to Lucknow after the assembly polls concluded when he vacated his Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat and decided to retain his recently won Karhal assembly seat and take on the role of Leader of Opposition in the state assembly.

The MLC elections highlighted the failure of the SP leadership to keep its flock together at a time when Akhilesh Yadav’s authority over his party is already facing challenges, including from those close to the party’s founding member and most prominent Muslim face, jailed controversial MLA Azam Khan. The SP failed miserably in keeping its leaders and voters from being poached by the ruling party.

Besides some SP candidates, even two nominees to Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal – a key ally of the Samajwadi Party – also withdrew their candidature days after filing their nominations. For the seats of Aligarh and Mathura-Etah-Mainpuri, the SP candidates failed to even file their nominations within the stipulated time frame, giving the BJP a free pass on these seats.

SP candidates Udayveer Singh and Rakesh Yadav alleged that BJP workers attacked them and snatched their nomination papers set on March 21. Akhilesh Yadav subsequently suspended eight party workers, including the candidates who withdrew their candidature, for anti-party activities. But the damage had been done.