BSP supremo Mayawati
Venkitesh Ramakrishnan



Lucknow: The electoral battle in Uttar Pradesh is steadily acquiring the dimensions of a quadrangular contest. This is the impression as the campaigning for the 18 seats in penultimate phase of polling in Uttar Pradesh came to a close on Tuesday and the electioneering for the fifth and final phase — scheduled for May 13 — gathered momentum in the remaining 14 seats.

What was originally considered to be an electoral tussle between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which controls the State government, and the principal Opposition, the Samajwadi Party (SP), is no longer confined to that dimension. The two national parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have made their presence felt in a sizable number of constituencies. In the process, it has become clear that neither of the two regional forces is going to match the dominant SP performance — 39 out of 80 — of 2004.

Splintered Minority vote

SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav The factors that have contributed to this situation are manifold. These include the splintering of the Muslim vote in several political directions, the consequent advantage obtained by the Hindutva-oriented BJP, the appreciation that the social sector programmes of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has evoked among a number of communities particularly in rural Uttar Pradesh, and the virtual collapse of the Dalit-Brahmin brotherhood built by the BSP during the 2005 Assembly polls.
The splintering of the Muslim vote had become evident right from the first phase of polling on April 16, and that has continued apace in the later phases too. In 2004, the largest chunk of Muslim votes had gone to the SP. But the SP’s association with the former BJP Chief Minister, Mr Kalyan Singh, has divested the party of the favourite position among the minority voters. The SP is still preferred by the community in seats fought by its stalwarts, such as Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mr Akhilesh Yadav, but elsewhere it is moving in other directions.
Cases in point among the seats going to polls in the last two phases are Moradabad and Dhaurahra, where former Indian cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin and a former Union Minister, Mr Jitin Prasad, respectively are attracting large segments of Muslim voters as Congress candidates. In Rampur too, the opposition to the Kalyan Singh association by senior SP leader, Mr Azam Khan, is causing problems for Jayaprada, the party’s sitting MP from the seat.
Congress, BJP benefit The BJP had benefited from the split in the Muslim vote in earlier phases too. In the seats going to polls in the last two phases this advantage is palpable in Aonla and Meerut, among others. In Aonla, former Union Minister, Mrs Maneka Gandhi, is the BJP candidate. The collapse of the BSP’s Dalit-Brahmin brotherhood has led to the flight of Brahmin votes away from the party in constituencies such as Moradabad and Aligarh. In Moradabad, it is benefiting the Congress while in Aligarh the BJP is the beneficiary.
Amid the gains being made by the Congress and the BJP, the two principal parties of the State are holding on with the strength of their core vote base. The BSP’s Dalit vote base continues to prop up its candidates in seats such as Saharanpur, Bijnor and Nagina while the SP’s OBC (Other Backward Caste) vote base stands it in good stead in constituencies such as Mainpuri, Kannauj, Etawa and Firozabad. Still, there is little doubt that both the regional forces are far behind their expectations at the beginning of the poll process.