Akhilesh’s BJP-bashing a manifestation of crumbling 'NDA vs PDA' formula

In Bengaluru to attend the Opposition Unity dialogue, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, on Monday (July 17), waxed eloquent about an “imminent rout of the BJP” in next year’s Lok Sabha polls. However, Yadav’s claim of a “nervous BJP” resorting to “jod tod ki rajneeti” in his home state of Uttar Pradesh to cut its potential losses appeared to be an unwitting admission of the steadily mounting challenges before the SP just 10 months ahead of the General Elections.

While the 26 Opposition parties that have congregated in the Garden City are yet to finalise a name for their embryonic electoral front against the BJP, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister has, for over two months now, been asserting that the only alternative to the saffron party’s NDA coalition is an alliance rooted in the welfare of PDA; an acronym for backwards castes (Pichde), Dalits and minorities (Alpsankhyak).

Crumbling PDA vs NDA formula

Yadav’s ‘PDA vs. NDA’ formula has its genesis in his party’s aggressive campaign against the BJP in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls of last March. Though the SP lost the election, Yadav’s successful effort at expanding his party’s traditional MY (Muslims and Yadavs) vote bank by poaching many backward caste and some prominent Dalit leaders from the BJP and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had chipped away a sizeable chunk of seats from the saffron party in caste-sensitive eastern and western Uttar Pradesh.

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Yet, 15 months later, the formidable caste-based alliance that Yadav had stitched together, either by inducting influential caste leaders into the SP or by allying with smaller outfits which held sway over different electorally crucial communities, is slowly coming apart. In quick succession over the week gone by, the SP lost its Ghosi MLA Dara Singh Chouhan and 2022 alliance partner OP Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) to the BJP.

A former minister in the first Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, Chouhan, also an influential leader of the most backward Nonia-Chauhan community spread across Mau, Ghazipur and Azamgarh districts in the eastern part of the state, had quit the BJP ahead of the 2022 assembly polls to join the SP. He had previously also been part of the BSP; a party he twice represented in the Rajya Sabha and once in the Lok Sabha.

Rajbhar, also a former ally of the BJP and minister in the first Adityanath cabinet, had joined hands with the SP in 2021 after an acrimonious fall-out with the BJP – at the time, he had sworn to “demolish the anti-backward and anti-Dalit BJP in UP”. Notably, Rajbhar’s differences with Adityanath had erupted shortly after the BJP won Uttar Pradesh in 2017 while his anger against the SP began to simmer after Yadav failed to steer his SP-led coalition to power in 2022, despite a vote share hike of 10 per cent hike and increase of 64 seats in the SP’s kitty against its performance of 2017.

Rajbhar and Chouhan

Incidentally, while Akhilesh will be joining the Opposition’s oust-BJP dialogue in Bengaluru on Tuesday morning, Rajbhar will be present at the meeting of the rebooted NDA that has been summoned by Narendra Modi in Delhi in the evening the same day to chalk out a strategy for installing a BJP-led government for at the Centre for a third consecutive term in May next year.

That both Rajbhar and Chauhan are leaders with a hugely elastic conscience and promiscuous political ideology is widely known. It is also true their credibility as leaders working for the welfare of the communities they claim to represent has steadily taken a hit with each switch of their political allegiance. However, the BJP realises that while both these leaders may not be electoral heavyweights in their individual capacity, they could still sway a sizeable chunk of votes when wedded into a wider and seemingly winning political alliance.

“On his own, Rajbhar has no credibility but, his SBSP, which claims to represent the interests of backward caste Rajbhars alongwith a wide range of other extremely backward communities spread across Purvanchal and Awadh regions, can still sway thousands of votes due to the caste factor. Those votes, in tight electoral contests between the BJP and the SP, can swing the result in favour of the BJP… we saw this happening in several constituencies in 2019 when even though all 39 candidates fielded by the SBSP, which was then neither in alliance with the SP nor with the BJP, lost their deposits, they polled enough votes in three or four constituencies of Purvanchal to ensure that the BJP candidate either lost narrowly or won by a whisker,” Harsh Sinha, political commentator and professor at the Gorakhpur University, told The Federal.

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Sanjay Srivastava, professor of political science at the Benaras Hindu University, agreed with Sinha’s view and made a more nuanced assessment.

“At a macro level, the BJP’s outreach to Rajbhar can be seen as part of the BJP’s ongoing efforts to consolidate its hold on the non-Yadav OBCs and MBCs but I suspect there is also a more specific purpose of getting him as well as Chauhan back into the NDA. Both SBSP and Chauhan have their clout in constituencies like Ghazipur, Mau, Ghosi, Machhlishahr, Ballia and Jaunpur,” he says.

“In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, though the BJP won 64 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats despite the SP-BSP alliance, its performance in these Purvanchal seats was poor. Of the 16 seats that the BJP and its allies lost, seven were in Purvanchal and in some of the seats that the BJP won in this region, such as Machhlishahr and Ballia, the votes polled by the SBSP candidate were significantly higher than the victory margin of the BJP candidate. By getting Rajbhar its side, the BJP wants to ensure that it doesn’t lose these votes in 2024,” he added.

Chauhan, who resigned his seat in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly upon joining the BJP, told The Federal that he will now work as “Narendra Modi’s foot soldier” to ensure that the saffron party “sweeps not just the 28 Lok Sabha seats that fall in Purvanchal (east Uttar Pradesh) but in all 80 constituencies of Uttar Pradesh”. He claimed that many other leaders from the non-Yadav backward communities who had quit the BJP, BSP or the Congress to join the SP ahead of the 2022 polls were now planning a ghar wapsi to the saffron party because “Akhilesh had betrayed the OBCs and MBCs” while the BJP, under Modi, was “the only party working for the welfare of these communities”.

What has driven ‘wary’ Akhilesh to Opposition camp?

For Akhilesh, who until two months back wanted to keep his distance from the then nascent efforts of uniting the Opposition to field a consensus candidate against the BJP on as many seats as possible across the country, this desertion by his backward caste allies is now a major cause of concern.

It is unclear whether the SP chief’s decision to jump on to the Opposition Unity bandwagon after having kept a safe distance from it until the very recent past is guided by the fear of losing the incremental votes his party had garnered 15 months ago due to an broader OBC-Minority consolidation in his favour. However, sources close to Yadav told The Federal that the SP “cannot afford to lose more OBC leaders ahead of the polls” and its party chief’s renewed PDA pitch, backed by the wider Opposition’s demand for a caste-based census, is “an attempt at reviving his outreach to the three important voting blocs of the backwards, Dalits and minorities”.

Lucknow-based political commentator and Dalit activist Professor Ravikant Chandan believes it is wrong to squarely pin the blame for Rajbhar and Chauhan’s altered loyalties on the BJP alone. “Of course the BJP would have used allurements and threats to get these people on its side but that doesn’t mean that Akhilesh is free of fault. Fact is that after a good start at reaching out to non-Yadav OBCs and some Dalit communities like the Pasis ahead of the Uttar Pradesh polls, Akhilesh abandoned his outreach as soon as he lost the election. For the past year, he has not taken to the streets even once in protest against the continuing attacks on Dalits and backward communities across UP and the BJP’s tacit support for such assaults,” Chandan said.

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Chandan claimed that even the SP’s traditional support base, the Muslims, are unhappy with Akhilesh’s apathy towards them. “Even on the issue of atrocities on Muslims, and more importantly the persecution of Muslim leaders of SP by the Yogi government, Akhilesh has been silent. Look at how he has left Azam Khan to fend for himself… Naturally, leaders from all these communities who had joined hands with Akhilesh because of his promise to fight for their cause are angry. At the end of the day, these people are in politics to win and so they are open to going back to the BJP because they think the SP is not putting up a fight and Modi will win again in 2024.”

‘Social engineering on verge of collapse’

A senior Samajwadi MP conceded to The Federal that the social engineering that Akhilesh had tried to build a year ago was “on the verge of collapse” and that “merely coming up with catchy acronyms like PDA is not going to win us the support of these communities”.

The MP said that Akhilesh should have utilised the past 15 months since the Uttar Pradesh poll results to “build on the gains we made in the assembly election and position the SP as a party that is fighting for not just the Muslims and Yadavs but for all oppressed communities since the BSP, the only other party that had a base among UP’s Dalits and some other backward communities, has already surrendered before the BJP”.

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He added, “forget adding new communities to our vote base, Akhilesh managed to even alienate the Muslims and those OBC or Dalit leaders who had come to our side a year ago… his father (late Mulayam Singh Yadav) was a 24X7 politician who knew the importance of social engineering but Akhilesh prefers to act only when elections are near and this is a recipe for political suicide when you are pitted against a rival like Modi”.