The opposition was so confident of winning Kairana that it gave the ticket to a Muslim, despite the possibility of an anti-Muslim Hindu consolidation.
When the BJP had lost the Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha bypolls in March, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath had blamed it on over-confidence. The party was so confident of winning that it didn’t put in its best to campaign and bring out voters. The SP-BSP alliance was such a last-minute announcement, that the BJP didn’t have the time to prepare a counter-strategy.
The BJP’s national president, Amit Shah, had said that bypolls are fought on local factors since people know they are not electing a government. A bypoll isn’t about Modi. In 2019, he had said, the same voters will be thinking more nationally. They will ask themselves whether they want to see Narendra Modi as prime minister once again or not.
The BJP’s defeat in Kairana Lok Sabha bypoll has belied both these ideas.
This time, the BJP knew it couldn’t afford to be over-confident. It knew there was a grand alliance of all opposition parties against it.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a rally in next door Baghpat just a day before voting took place in Kairana. In his speech, he even addressed the concerns of Kairana’s sugarcane farmers.
The BJP swept western UP seats like Kairana in 2014 with very high margins. Memories of the Jat-Muslim communal violence in 2013 were fresh in people’s minds. The Hindu-Muslim polarisation was complete.
To remind Kairana’s Hindu voters about why they shouldn’t vote the same way as Muslims, it cooked up a controversy in nearby Aligarh. The portrait of a dead man called Mohammed Ali Jinnah at the Aligarh Muslim University was the BJP’s answer to the problems of Kairana’s sugarcane farmers. Jayant Chaudhary of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) said the election was Jinnah versus Ganna.
The BJP’s Uttar Pradesh strategist, Sunil Bansal, also Amit Shah’s man Friday, camped in Kairana for days. He did all those things for which he and his boss have been hailed as modern-day Chanakyas. The RSS was at work, the panna pramukhs were in action, the WhatsApp groups were buzzing.
The numbers speak
For a sense of how stupendous the BJP’s Kairana defeat is, here are some numbers. In 2014, the BJP had won more votes in this seat than the BSP, SP and the RLD put together (the Congress was in alliance with the RLD). If the 2014 “Modi wave” had prevailed, the opposition should have lost this seat. If Hindutva polarisation had worked, the RLD wouldn’t have stood a chance even with the support of the SP and the BSP.
In the 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections, the BJP won 4 out of the 5 assembly segments in the Kairana Lok Sabha area. But the numbers had already fallen. If we add the opposition’s votes in these five assembly segments in 2017, it would be ahead by a good 2 lakh votes. But the opposition was divided.
Now the opposition has come together. It was so confident of winning this seat that it gave the ticket to a Muslim, despite the possibility of an anti-Muslim Hindu consolidation.
A third of the seat’s voters are Muslim. With Begum Hassan winning the seat, she becomes the only Muslim from Uttar Pradesh in the current Lok Sabha.
The Kairana bypoll took place because the sitting MP, Hukum Singh, passed away. When a sitting legislator dies and his kin contests the seat, the kin usually wins because of the sympathy factor over the death. Despite that, Hukum Singh’s daughter Mriganka Singh could not win the seat for the BJP.
Nothing is working
How can the BJP downplay bypoll losses when its stated aim is to win all elections from panchayat to Parliament?
Yes bypolls typically see low voter turn-outs, but bypolls also typically see the incumbent party getting re-elected.
If anything, people in by-elections should be voting for the party in power to get work done from the government. Not doing so is to show resentment against the government’s performance.
The first bypoll in UP after Yogi Adityanath became CM was the Sikandra assembly seat in Kanpur Dehat. The BJP MLA had died, and the BJP won the seat again in the re-poll. The opposition was not united.
But since the opposition came together in March, the BJP finds it impossible to win by-elections. It lost the Noorpur Vidhan Sabha today as well. The Samajwadi Party snatched it away from the BJP.
The BJP may do a good job of not showing it, but it must be in great panic. The party has lost a Lok Sabha bypoll in western UP where Hindutva was ruling the roost.
Hindutva, Modi rally, panna pramukhs, RSS, Amit Shah’s strategies… nothing seems to be working for the BJP against opposition unity in Uttar Pradesh.
If it has a strategy to counter the unprecedented index of opposition unity in UP, we are yet to see it.
One reason for this precipitous decline in popularity – which a united opposition is much better positioned to benefit from – is the incumbent’s record in office. With a large, contiguous swathe of India now ruled by the same party, twin anti incumbency can develop. If the victory chariot has one wheel of 24 / 7 electioneering, the other one should encompass economic advancement. That second aspect is largely missing from the narrative.