Defeat in the Kairana bypoll is seen as a fresh blow for the BJP after it lost Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seats in UP earlier this year.
New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a star campaigner for the BJP across the country, has once again failed to deliver on his home turf.
The defeat in the Kairana bypoll is seen as a fresh blow for the BJP in the largest and most critical state after it lost the Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seats, the latter being Adityanath’s home constituency, in March this year. The party also lost an assembly seat — Noorpur. All were held by the BJP previously.
Since he became CM in March last year, Adityanath has emerged as the most sought after election campaigner for the BJP, next only to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah. He has addressed rallies in a number of states, including Gujarat, Tripura and Karnataka.
He also campaigned for the Kairana and Palghar by-elections in UP and Maharashtra, respectively. While the BJP managed to retain the Palghar seat, it lost Kairana to the RLD. The results of these bypolls were declared Thursday.
“As BJP says you are successful if you win — going by that parameter, definitely Yogi has failed to deliver for the party,” said Sanjay Kumar, director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
“Earlier he couldn’t save his own constituency Gorakhpur and now Kairana,” he added.
‘Hindutva agenda did not work’
When the BJP registered a landslide victory in the 2017 UP assembly elections, Adityanath initially was not among the front-runners for the top job.
The opposition alleges that Adityanath, seen as a Hindutva icon, was chosen by the BJP top brass to polarise the state further.
“In 2017, the BJP had won primarily because they were able to falsely propagate among the voters that Akhilesh Yadav government is blocking development initiated by the central government,” said Samajwadi Party leader Sudhir Panwar.
“However, the BJP mistook this verdict as a successful execution of its communal agenda and Yogi became CM to polarise the state further. Now the voters have understood their hidden agenda and are defeating them,” Panwar claimed.
After he took charge as CM, the BJP aggressively pursued what is seen as its Hindutva agenda, by shutting down meat shops among others.
“In Kairana too, he tried to make it a ‘Jinnah vs Ganna’ election. But voters now have understood them well,” said RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary, referring to the debate over Jinnah portraits and the woes of sugarcane farmers in the region.
Rise in Dalit atrocities
The rising number of incidents of Dalit atrocities seemed to have turned up the heat on the Adityanath government. It started with a fight between Dalits and Thakurs in Shabeerpur village of Saharanpur district and soon incidents were reported from other parts of the state.
Both in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and the 2017 UP assembly elections, the BJP had managed to secure a good chunk of Dalit votes.
“Dalits, especially the youth, voted for the BJP hoping for a better life. Instead, it became worse creating a perception that BJP is an anti-Dalit party,” said Lucknow-based sociologist Vinod Chandra.
In Saharanpur, the Dalits seem to be angry because Bhim Army leader Chandrashekhar Azad was arrested under the National Security Act and is still in jail.
To counter that, the Modi government initiated an outreach campaign, as part of which top BJP leaders including, Adityanath, visited Dalit houses and shared a meal with the families.
Despite such overtures, the Dalits continued to protest against the BJP’s policies. So much so that five Dalit BJP MPs openly lashed out at the government.
The discontent also grew among upper castes, BJP’s traditional vote bank. The Brahmins who form 12 per cent of the state’s population, are unhappy over the “importance” given to Thakurs in the state.
“People from a particular caste felt empowered under Yogi and went on to attack Dalits everywhere,” said SP spokesperson and MLC Sunil Singh Yadav.
When a rape case was filed against Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a Thakur, the state government initially didn’t take any action against him. It was only after pressure mounted from the opposition and the media that the Adityanath government finally arrested the MLA.
The BJP, however, does not accept the bypoll results as a failure of Adityanath.
“Under Yogi-ji, the state is becoming crime free and criminals are surrendering to save their lives,” said Vijay Bahadur Pathak, the BJP in-charge of western UP. “New investments are coming to the state and development is taking place everywhere.”
Political analysts, however, claim the BJP’s vote bank in UP has declined after Adityanath took over as CM.
“If you see in 2014, the vote percentage of the BJP in Kairana was 51 per cent,” said Sanjay Kumar.
“So the mere arithmetic of a united opposition couldn’t have defeated the BJP. A RLD victory means there is a decline in the BJP’s vote bank and some of its traditional voters are moving away from it,” he said.
Yogiji has not been a stellar choice. The deaths of children and infants in the government hospital in Gorakhpur last August is seen by some as the moment when the party’s narrative all over the country began to unravel. Emotive issues will not suffice to retain power in 2019. The string of by poll results yesterday suggests Indians are saying, Yeh dil maange much, much more.