The big haul for the SP-Congress alliance with about 42 seats in Uttar Pradesh opens up the battle for the 2027 assembly elections with Yogi Adityanath now facing a tough challenge from a resurgent Akhilesh Yadav. Akhilesh had reduced the BJP’s seats in the last assembly election too but that was not enough. The SP-Congress alliance will now be resurgent, especially with the complete decline of Mayawati, and Dalit voters deserting the Bahujan Samaj Party.
The BJP had its back to the wall before 2014 in Uttar Pradesh as the regional outfits, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, had a firm grip over power. The BJP won 10 seats in UP in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, less than half of the Congress’s 21. The saffron party knew that if it was to come to power in the country in 2014, it needed to win in UP and win big. This was why with Narendra Modi being projected as the PM face, the party sent his key lieutenant Amit Shah as in-charge of Uttar Pradesh and he camped there.
The SP, which was in power in the state, the BSP, and the Congress fought separately and misread the public mood in favour of the BJP. The result was the NDA winning a historic 73 seats in the state and more than doubling its vote share to 43 per cent. PM Modi contested from Varanasi – a move that proved to be a masterstroke as UP came to be closely associated with him as he struck an emotional chord with the people of the state. UP, which often gave the country prime ministers, was adopted by Modi to become one.
This also paved the way for the BJP to win Uttar Pradesh in 2017 comprehensively after a long gap despite an SP-Congress alliance, and Modi installed an unlikely candidate in Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. The saffron-clad monk proved true to form as he used an iron hand to check organised crime and mafia in the state, rolled out the bulldozer against elements considered politically untouchable, and vowed to root out corruption.
The opposition was quick to smell the formidable challenge and Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati buried the hatchet to join hands in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in UP, planning a repeat of Bihar where arch-rivals Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad had teamed up to stop the BJP victory chariot. With Rashtriya Lok Dal also by their side, the SP-BSP combine had a grand dream to stop Modi’s victory march through UP. But the effort failed, strengthening the Modi-Yogi UP double-engine.
The NDA still notched up 64 seats in Uttar Pradesh despite the formidable caste equation on the other side – in fact, the untold story of 2019 is how the alliance upped its vote share from 2014 and crossed the 50 per cent mark. The result was that the SP-BSP coalition broke soon after the election results. 2022 saw Yogi Adityanath win power again in UP – the first CM to do so in over three decades in the state.
Come 2024, the situation seems to have changed for the BJP. The party may need a course correction in the key state ahead of 2027.
With inputs from News18