What the exit polls don’t tell: A big win in UP is no guarantee for BJP
The month-long cacophony of political rhetoric to wrest power in Uttar Pradesh is finally over, giving way to equally raucous and frequently erring exit poll experts to wreak confusion for the next 48 hours before the Election Commission declares the real winners.
The UP exit polls have been unanimous in their conclusion of a majority for the incumbent BJP – and by extension, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath – but vastly divided in their seat-projection; one pollster even predicted an upper limit of 326 for the saffron party and its allies. None predict a victory – or even a close finish – for Akhilesh Yadav and the many allies he had brought under the umbrella pre-poll coalition led by his Samajwadi Party.
The Congress, despite Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s high-adrenaline campaign, is predicted to register a performance worse than its worst showing yet. And Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), as per these surveys, won’t be springing its promised surprise.
There’s little need to explain the futility of analysing exit polls, which serve the limited purpose of giving their contractors big money and plenty of air-time or of often allowing unlikely winners – invariably the same political party in almost every election – grounds for validating their claims of an imminent “thumping majority”, if indeed the predictions do come true.
What merits dispassionate vivisection, though, are the issues that dominated the UP polls and the undeniable impact that the election’s actual outcome would have on the foreseeable future of Indian politics, particularly for the period leading up to the 2024 general election.
Many of the issues that dominated the election campaign in UP – those proffered by the ruling BJP or ones canvassed by its challengers, the SP-led alliance and the Congress, in particular – find a resonance in much of the country today. As such a mandate for change or one for continuity in the country’s most populous state will be an essential pointer to which of the two narratives may find greater acceptance among the electorate in the Lok Sabha polls due two years from now; at least in the many states that are currently running on the much publicised ‘double-engine ki sarkaar’ model.
The UP campaign, despite the multi-pronged contest in the state, had two clear themes.
The ruling BJP sought a renewed mandate by ferocious avowals of jingoistic nationalism, further othering of the Muslim minority and by raising the bogey of a global crisis (a la Ukraine) that India can withstand only as long as Narendra Modi remains prime minister. The party’s continuing effort to further fortify its Hindutva-identity vote bank, one that subsumes all caste identities, while simultaneously creating a caste and religion neutral electoral bloc of ‘laabharthis’ who must repay the government in votes for what they received from it in cash or kind through various welfare schemes was the other plank of this narrative.
The BJP’s challengers, on the other hand, drew on issues such as farmer distress, rising prices, joblessness, growing communal and social strife, the state’s atrocities on the already oppressed, the threat of dilution of affirmative action tools such as reservations in government jobs and educational institutions, COVID mismanagement, the floating dead bodies in the Ganges, et al. The other, and by no means less visible, aspect of this strategy was the effort, particularly by the SP, to break the formidable union that the BJP had solemnised of its traditional upper caste Hindu vote bank and the newly-minted voters from smaller but electorally crucial backward and Dalit communities.
On the ground, in the electoral battlefield of UP, there was perceptible anger among voters, particularly in rural areas, against the incumbent BJP government and its lawmakers – even if this didn’t always extend to the party at the Centre and rarely ever to Modi. The frustration of voters over issues such as rising prices of commodities – cooking gas, food grain, edible oil, fuel and fertilisers, in particular – was visibly greater than their sense of gratitude towards the government for providing them free ration during the pandemic.
Similarly, anger against the state’s inability to provide employment by filling up numerous vacancies in government jobs or its highhandedness against jobless youth who protested intermittently against the routine cancellation of various recruitment exams was a common point of discussion in village after village, town after town. The issue of stray cattle harming crops or growing agrarian distress and the government’s apathy towards farmers was a common refrain from the western flank of UP right to its eastern corner.
Evidently then, there was much that gave hope to the opposition, especially to Akhilesh Yadav who was clearly viewed as leading the best formation that could oust the BJP. It is this public anger that political stalwarts such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chauhan, with their reputation of being electoral weathervanes, sensed when they chose to dump the BJP and defect to the SP, along with several MLAs loyal to them, weeks ahead of the polls.
The BJP maintained, at least publicly, that none of these issues would stop it from crossing the majority mark. It is a different matter, though, that many of the party’s leaders, including several candidates, would admit off-the-record that anti-incumbency was high enough to prevent the party from breaking the state’s three-decade old tradition of a party getting a second consecutive term in office. The party had to employ its collective might – from the triumvirate of Modi, Amit Shah and Adityanath down to sundry Union ministers, chief ministers of BJP-ruled states, MPs and MLAs – to shore up its prospects in UP.
For Modi and his BJP, the importance of winning UP is obvious. A defeat in a state that is famous for paving the way for whoever rules Delhi would substantially shred the party’s cloak of invincibility and dent Modi’s aura as a leader with no real challenger. The BJP’s carefully built narrative of there being no alternative to its might and popularity would suffer a seemingly irreversible blow if it loses UP despite the party pressing into service every tool it has in its electoral playbook.
Soon after its landslide Lok Sabha victory in 2019, the BJP had lost power in Jharkhand and Maharashtra and had a below-par showing in Haryana. The following year, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party succeeded in retaining its hold on Delhi while the BJP-led Centre continued to create problems of governance in the national capital territory through the lieutenant governor. Despite a stellar showing in the Lok Sabha polls in Bengal, the BJP also failed to dislodge Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress last year following a vicious campaign. The party’s tall claims of making significant in-roads in Kerala and Tamil Nadu too had proved to be all bluster.
With this recent electoral record, the impression that Modi could no longer swing state elections for his party, despite having no challenger at the national level, had gained ground. A setback in UP, also the state that sent Modi to the Lok Sabha in 2014 and 2019, could be a fatal blow to PM’s popularity at a time when over half-a-dozen states, including his home state of Gujarat, are poised for assembly polls over the next 18 months.
If Modi’s credibility is on the line, the stakes are even higher for Yogi. The CM, despite not expressly stating his national ambitions, has pitched himself as a leader in his own right, a Hindutva icon second only to Modi. In the power corridors of the RSS-BJP combine, it is no secret that many believe Yogi – and not Amit Shah – to be the rightful successor of Modi as the party’s leader and PM-face, whenever Modi vacates the top post. A victory in UP under his watch, particularly if it is as comprehensive as some exit polls suggest, will strengthen Yogi’s claim as Modi’s only possible successor. Conversely, a defeat, particularly after the unprecedented 312-seat mandate the BJP had got in the state in 2017, would effectively push Yogi out of this race, at least for the time being (predictably with Modi-Shah’s encouragement).
For Akhilesh, who woke up rather late in the day but quickly built a formidable coalition and ran a visibly popular campaign, a loss would almost certainly lead to another churn within the SP that had, in 2017, been witness to an ugly and embarrassing feud within its founding family. A loss would also threaten the sustainability of the social engineering he had tried to achieve in this election by compromising his core Muslim-Yadav vote bank to add to it other non-Yadav backward castes and non-Jatav Dalits.
The Congress was never tipped to win UP but it was hopeful of a fair increase in its dwindling vote share in the state because of the massive crowds that turned up for Priyanka Gandhi’s campaign. Gandhi aspires to change UP’s political discourse with her ‘Ladki Hoon Lad Sakti Hoon’ plank, out-of-the-box candidate selection strategy and issue-oriented politics.
A complete rout in UP, especially if it is coupled with a defeat in Punjab and the other poll-bound states, would trigger another implosion in the crisis-ridden Congress. It would embolden the likes of Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari and others to, once again, raise their banner of revolt against the party’s first family – the Gandhis. The obvious repercussions of such a renewed flux within the Congress on the question of its centrality to the opposition – already under challenge by the likes of Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, K Chandrasekhar Rao – cannot be overstated.
For Mayawati, a failure to hold on to her Dalit vote bank – especially if her captive bloc of Jatav votes also splits – would make her even more politically vulnerable than she has already begun to appear. The current election saw her exchange uncharacteristic niceties with Amit Shah but if Behenji’s electoral stock comes tumbling down any further, she may lose much more than just her vote bank.
But the ramifications that a renewed mandate for the BJP may have for India’s polity at large will be far worse than the impact that saffron victory would have on individual political leaders or their parties. A favourable verdict for the BJP, despite undeniable anger against its politics of rabid communal polarisation and policies that have pushed a record number of people below poverty line and out of jobs, would easily be construed by its leaders – the PM in particular – as a resounding endorsement of the politics and policies the party has brazenly pushed over the past eight years.
It would, perhaps, not be out of line to question if an increasing section of India’s electorate is willing to overlook even personal tragedies inflicted by the government because it received free rations, consumed Modi ka namak, or was tacitly appreciative of the BJP fortifying its electoral edifice with muscular Hindutva, communal hate and a personality cult that feeds off the nation’s misery.
We’ll have the answer on March 10.
