BJP past majority mark in early trends, SP leads cross 100

If the BJP scores a victory, it will be the first time since 1985 that a party would come to power in two consecutive elections in Uttar Pradesh.

File image of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath | ANI

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies seem set to retain power in Uttar Pradesh, with poll trends indicating they are leading in 264 seats while their main challenger, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and allies, was leading in 132 seats as of 1 pm.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is leading in two seats, according to trends. The Congress is leading in three seats.

If the BJP scores a victory, it will be the first time since 1985 that a party would come to power in two consecutive elections in UP. And, Yogi Adityanath will become the only chief minister of India’s largest state to get a renewed mandate after serving a full five-year-term in office.

A win in UP will have an impact on the political fortunes of the BJP in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

In an interview to the Indian Express, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had said that the route to Delhi is via Lucknow.

“Since Uttar Pradesh has 80 seats in the Lok Sabha, it’s very important for the BJP to be in power in Uttar Pradesh to return to power in 2024… If anyone wants to form a government with full majority at the Centre, it cannot be without Uttar Pradesh’s mandate,” he had said.

Considered a bellwether for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the UP results shows that the BJP’s Hindutva agenda — be it the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya and the Kashi Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi — coupled with Modi government’s pro-poor welfare measure and an improved law and order situation succeeded in tiding over farmers anger, largescale unemployment and mismanagement that the state witnessed during Covid’s second wave.

“More than anything else, the impact of this victory will be more cultural… The BJP will use it to push its Hindutva agenda further in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The second term of the Modi government has been characterised by its thrust on the Hindutva front. That’s an insurance against the government’s failure on the economic front,” political analyst Suhas Palshikar told ThePrint.

Palshikar added that the UP elections would not only assume national importance but would also have an impact in states like Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

In 2017, riding only on the Modi wave with no CM face, the BJP and its allies had swept India’s largest state winning 325 of the 403 seats. The victory strengthened BJP’s position electorally in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The party contributed 62 Lok Sabha seats for the BJP out of the total 80 seats.

At the time, the BJP sprung a surprise by picking a perceived political light-weight, Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, as the CM. Adityanath’s five-year term has been marked with several ups and downs. The farmers’ agitation in western UP and the Lakhimpur Kheri incident, where eight people were killed, was a major embarrassment for the party in the state.

Test of Akhilesh’s leadership

Going by the early poll trends, the SP could not live up to its expectation of giving a tough fight to the BJP. More than anything else, the UP poll results is also a test of Akhilesh Yadav’s leadership.

Yadav has been trying to expand his party’s footprint beyond its core base of Yadavs and Muslims. He allied with smaller parties representing other backward classes — Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal, Om Prakash Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, Keshav Dev Maurya’s Mahan Dal, and the Apna Dal (Kamerawadi) of Krishna Patel.

But the experiment seems to have flopped.

Since 2017, it will be the third consecutive loss for SP under Akhilesh’s leadership. The party, which was ruling the state, won just 47 (21.82 per cent vote share) of the 311 seats it contested in 2017 assembly elections. Its alliance with the Congress failed to enthuse voters.

Two years down the line, the party allied with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls but the alliance failed to make its mark. The SP won just 5 seats out of 37 seats it contested, accounting for 18.11 per cent vote share.

Results likely to further push BSP to political irrelevance

The BSP’s political fortunes took a further hit. Early poll trends show BSP leading in 6 seats. The no-show indicates that Mayawati’s core vote bank, the Jatavs, have moved away from the party, further relegating the party to political irrelevance.

In 2017, BSP won 19 of the 403 seats it contested, with 22.23 per cent vote share. In 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the party won 10 seats out of the 383 seats it contested securing 3.67 per cent vote share.