The latest meltdown in Uttar Pradesh politics, where seven Samajwadi Party MLAs, plus one invalid vote, have defected and voted for BJP Rajya Sabha candidates, is nothing short of a ‘great betrayal’. This has now become an almost nemesis for the SP, as soon after the 2022 UP election results, its allies like OP Rajbhar‘s SBSP and Jayant Chaudhry’s RLD left the alliance to become a part of the NDA instead. What has happened in UP is what the BJP has already achieved by splitting Shiv Sena, NCP and flip-flopping Nitish Kumar from the NDA and back. But UP’s capital Lucknow leads to the road to New Delhi, hence UP deserves scrutiny for the challenge it poses to the BJP-led NDA towards the April-May general elections. Will the SP-Congress INDIA coalition, without the BSP, mount a formidable challenge, particularly after this SP fiasco? The nation awaits.
On February 12, shortly after noon as I waited alone for SP chief Akhilesh Yadav in the basement of Lohia Sabhagar, he alighted from the lift with a visibly ‘red-faced’ Swami Prasad Maurya. He asked me to leave while they talked. The next day, Maurya resigned as SP general secretary and later as MLC. In fact, this was all in the coming as on 24 December 2023, Akhilesh had privately confirmed to me that Maurya was a BJP conduit! That would have been a bombshell then but has ended with a whimper now. The reason is simple—while in the BSP and BJP, Maurya did not dare speak against Hindu gods or scriptures like Ramcharitramanas or Manusmriti. But he took the secular SP platform to vent his ire, violating the party line of not targeting any religion. Hence, Maurya’s fate was sealed, but not before he had wrecked the SP from within. Several upper-caste SP MLAs have now shifted allegiance in favour of BJP Rajya Sabha candidates.
Akhilesh had accommodated Maurya as MLC despite his 2022 election loss and never insisted his MP daughter Sangmitra Maurya (BJP) resign. But Maurya’s loose tongue, to the loss of SP, which was his cardinal agenda, did not stop, until the upper-caste MLAs led by SP chief whip Manoj Pandey, expressed their open displeasure with him. Pandey even called Maurya mentally unstable. Ironically, most of the eight MLAs who have deserted Akhilesh now are upper-castes, just when the SP fielded two upper-caste candidates, Alok Ranjan and Jaya Bachchan, and one Dalit candidate, Ramji Lal Suman. This surely casts ramifications for the Lok Sabha election. The SP and Congress have declared their coalition despite cracks in the INDIA bloc at the national level. They had allied in the 2017 UP election too.
UP politics is wide open
The other important player in UP polity is the BSP, which won 10 seats with the SP in 2019 Lok Sabha election but disassociated later. BSP chief Mayawati has thrice allied with the BJP in government and could again provide succour if needed, given that the BSP has been reduced to only one MLA in the UP assembly.
Akhilesh and Congress leader Jairam Ramesh hinted at accommodating the BSP in INDIA but Mayawati has kept the cards close to her chest. What might, therefore, be brewing within the BSP? Interestingly, its vote share in UP nosedived from 19 per cent in 2019 general elections to 13 per cent in 2022 assembly election. With an existential crisis looming, is the BSP secretly hobnobbing with Asaduddin Owiasi of AIMIM, Amir Rishadi of Rashtriya Ulema Council, Muhammed Ayub of Peace Party, and Badruddin Ajmal of AIUDF? This may be its last resort for survival, else Mayawati will likely shift BSP votes towards BJP as she did in the 2006 Meerut corporation elections. But if BSP ties up with Muslim parties, then it is bound to make an almost new political calculus in UP. After the imposition of the Election Commission’s model code of conduct, perhaps Mayawati will reveal her strategy.
Maurya’s comments on Hinduism outraged SP’s upper-caste MLAs enough to switch to the BJP. But the SP welcomes all faiths, unlike the BJP’s sole devotion to Lord Ram, who is all-encompassing. However, what seems to have riled the BJP more is Akhilesh’s reference to Allama Iqbal in the assembly session. He had made a satirical remark on BJP citing Iqbal, who called Lord Ram as ‘Imam-e-Hind’ aka Leader of Hindustan. But the BJP accused him of invoking Iqbal who had presided over the pivotal 1930 Muslim League session advocating a separate Muslimstate. While it is true that Iqbal wrote Tarana-e-Hind (1904), on the eve of partition of Bengal, and later Tarana-e-Millat (1910), the unanswered question is what forced Iqbal to write the latter?
Akhilesh’s Iqbal reference comes almost 100 years later as testimony to the SP’s ‘inclusivity’—propounded by Ram Manohar Lohia, who longed for India-Pakistan-Bangladesh confederation—compared to the BJP’s Akhand Bharat plank. But the BJP has engineered a coup in the SP, which assumes greater importance with the MLC polls nearing in March. How will SP-Congress recuperate from the desertions of Rajbhars, Jats, Pals, Mauryas, Brahmins and Thakurs, the denomination of the MLAs who have left, will script the outcome of UP in the forthcoming general election.
The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner and political commentator. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
I read about startups, deep tech and the private space industry taking off with Modi opening multiple ISRO linked facilities to boost the private space sector.
I then come to this nonsense!
When will people like this author realise that the country has moved on. Their political masters need to be made aware too.