Heat and dust

After three rounds of polling, the verdict in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections is anybody's guess.

VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN in Lucknow

Midway through the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, with three rounds of the seven-phase polling over, the electorate continues to keep political pundits guessing. The broad projections from the areas that have already witnessed polling as well as the ones that go to the polls by May 8 point to the formation of a hung Assembly in the three-way race between the ruling Samajwadi Party (S.P.), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Perhaps, the only definitive projection about the elections is that the Congress, which leads the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre, will bring up the rear, at the fourth spot, although with more seats than it won in the 2002 elections and an improved vote share.

The reasons for the projection of a fractured verdict are not far to seek. Primarily, there is no single issue that has dominated these elections. The most discussed issue is, of course, the three-and-a-half-year governance record of the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led S.P. government, and it is true that its critics far outnumber the rest. They come from parties such as the BSP, the BJP, the Congress and the Jan Morcha, which is led by former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh and former Lok Sabha member of the S.P. Raj Babbar. But each of these parties is wooing the same voter, motivated by an anti-incumbency feeling, and this will, naturally, lead to a division of the Opposition vote.

In a sense, most of the charges levelled against the S.P.'s governance record have emerged from the Jan Morcha's mass agitations, but this party could be making the least gains out of the anti-incumbency vote, basically because it is small in terms of organisation.

The anti-incumbency feeling has sprung mainly from the S.P. government's dismal performance on the law and order front and its inability to make available sufficient power supply. While the government's track record in these two aspects has been criticised more or less universally, its work in many other areas, such as providing debt relief to farmers, unemployment wages to the youth and educational grant to girls, have received popular appreciation. So much so, the S.P. has made bold to raise its campaign on the government's development record. The S.P. leadership says its government has been far superior to the governments led by the BJP or the Congress or their partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the UPA respectively. This argument, too, has many takers in the electorate.

In such a situation, all parties seeking to capitalise on anti-incumbency need add-ons in their electioneering. The BJP has fallen back on its time-tested tactic of causing communal polarisation, albeit indirectly. The controversial, communally sensitive, compact disk (CD) it released during the campaign and later officially withdrew after getting into trouble with the Election Commission was an effort in this direction. Reference to the CD and some of its content is still part of the BJP campaign theme (see separate story).

The Congress leadership seems to be working under the belief that reminding the electorate about the "halcyon days of the Nehru-Gandhi family's rule" would be good enough to attract the voter who has developed an anti-establishment feeling. The BSP, on its part, is focussing on building a combination of Dalits and Brahmins in order to tap the anti-incumbency feeling.

If response to electioneering is the only criteria, the BSP could be rated as the frontrunner, with the S.P. and the BJP in a close race for the second spot. The BSP has gone about its campaign meticulously and has also had a head start on the other parties (see separate story).

Exit polls after three rounds of polling have put the BSP ahead, with the S.P. and the BJP slugging it out for the second spot. The track record of exit polls in the last two major elections in the State does point to a level of accuracy. During the 2002 Assembly elections and the 2004 Lok Sabha elections most of the exit polls predicted the highest number of seats to the S.P. and the projections proved right.

A number of factors, manifest at the grassroots, also point to an ascendant BSP. These factors show that the BSP is best placed to tap the anti-incumbency feeling against the S.P. and, indeed, in many parts of the State it has become the rallying point for this. The political plank of Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara (Dalit-Brahmin brotherhood) built painstakingly by the party over the past two and a half years, as well as the large number of seats (86 out of 403) the party has allocated to upper-caste candidates has contributed in a big way to its emergence as the anti-establishment rallying point.

The third and equally important factor is that the strict security arrangements made by the Election Commission for polling has helped the BSP's core support base, consisting essentially of Dalits and other marginalised sections of society, to vote fearlessly. This support base has been increasingly fighting its way to the polling booths, overcoming threats and violence by upper castes and middle castes, in all elections since 1993 when it had an alliance with the S.P. Most political observers believe that this process has touched its highest point in the three rounds of polling in the current elections. The preparations of the BSP for the remaining rounds indicate a continuation of the trend.

When the BSP developed the idea of Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara, the party leadership's calculation was that it was good enough to reach a majority on its own. The calculation was based on a simple arithmetical estimate of the caste composition of the State. Informal estimates put the vote share of Dalits at about 23 per cent, of Brahmins at about 10 per cent, and of Muslims at about 16 per cent. By this calculation Dalit and Brahmin votes add up to 33 per cent and with a section of the Muslim vote the party would rustle up an unbeatable vote share.

However, election trends suggest that things have not developed in such a foolproof manner at the grassroots. Caste-based politics continues to be the basic structure of politics in Uttar Pradesh, but the combination of various castes and communities on an election platform is not happening on a uniform scale.

According to the Lucknow-based political analyst Indra Bhushan Singh, caste politics in Uttar Pradesh is becoming increasingly decentralised. He said: "The combination of castes and communities is not happening uniformly across the State. Instead, powerful candidates are forging their own caste-community combinations at the level of individual constituencies. This is a trend visible in most parts of Uttar Pradesh now. In such a situation, a Brahmin candidate of the S.P. or the BJP may emerge more powerful in a particular seat though the Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara is a significant phenomenon in terms of State-level politics."

Indra Bhushan Singh added that given this decentralisation of caste politics, all castes, especially upper castes, had also started resorting to tactical voting, just like Muslims. "The objective of Muslims when they resorted to tactical voting was to defeat the Hindutva-oriented BJP, but the objective of upper-caste groups is to increase the respective caste's representation in the Assembly." According to Indra Bhushan Singh, this trend militates against the easy fulfilment of the BSP's simple, almost simplistic, calculation on the caste-community arithmetic.

Two cases where this divergence has been caused by the decentralisation of caste politics, particularly that of the upper castes, are Haidergarh in Barabanki district and Faridpur in Bareilly district. Haidergarh, by informal estimates, is the constituency with the highest upper caste voter concentration in the State. Brahmins and Thakurs constitute over 60 per cent of the electorate, with Brahmins alone accounting for approximately 35 per cent. The constituency has elected only upper-caste leaders in the last 10 Assembly elections (including two by-elections) since 1977. In 2002, Rajnath Singh, the then Chief Minister and now the BJP's national president, won the seat.

Given this background, the BSP did not contest this seat until 2002 when its candidate, Hariram Singh, got only 6.48 per cent of the votes polled. Rajnath Singh had 52.65 per cent and the runner-up, Arvind Singh of the S.P., 33.64 per cent. But the atmosphere in Haidergarh is markedly different this time. BSP candidate Ashutosh Awasthi is a forceful presence and is counted among the probable winners. Others in the contest include Arvind Singh of the S.P., Sunderlal Dixit of the BJP and Ramvriksh Trivedi of the Congress.

Ashutosh Awasthi's candidature on the BSP ticket is indicative of the winds of change sweeping Haidergarh. Ashutosh is the son of Surendranath `Puttu' Awasthi, a senior State BJP leader and the head of one of the most influential Brahmin families of Haidergarh. Puttu Awasthi won the seat in 1985, 1991 and 1996 on the Congress ticket. He joined the BJP dramatically in 2000, when Rajnath Singh became Chief Minister after engineering defections from various parties, including the BSP. At that time, Rajnath Singh wanted a safe seat to enter the Assembly and Puttu Awasthi obliged by resigning from the Congress and vacating his seat for the then Chief Minister. Puttu Awasthi is still in the BJP but has not yet formally joined the BJP candidate's campaign. It is obvious where his blessings are in the present contest.

The local leadership and rank and file of the BSP are elated at the impact they are making in an "upper-caste bastion" like Haidergarh. They think it is a vindication of the idea of Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara.

But travel to Faridpur, a Scheduled Caste reserved constituency in Bareilly district, and the situation is strikingly different. The S.P. won the seat in 2002 with 35.2 per cent of the votes polled, followed by the BJP with 35 per cent. The BSP got 12 per cent. The Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara is not visible here and the majority of upper castes root for the BJP's Shyam Bihari Lal.

The decentralisation of caste politics has its manifestations among smaller parties and groups that have come up in the context of the elections. The Samajwadi Kranti Dal (SKD), formed by former Union Minister Beni Prasad Verma, then in the S.P., and former Congress leader Arif Mohammed Khan, has launched an intensive campaign in as many as 50 constituencies in Barabanki, Baharaich, Faizabad and Bareilly districts. Simple logic would have it that Verma's manoeuvres would affect the S.P. because he was a senior leader of the party until recently. But in a large number of seats the SKD is bound to impact the BJP negatively, including in Ayodhya, where Verma is the SKD candidate supported by the Congress. The reason is that Verma is an influential Kurmi leader, who is capable of weaning away even those Kurmi votes that normally went with the BJP. Clearly, the decentralisation of caste politics is messing up the electoral scene, though it can be safely assumed that the BSP's manoeuvres have a relatively better impact on the ground.

The formation of the government after the polls would indeed be a taxing exercise if the current trend persists in the next four rounds of polling. A fractured mandate could also cause problems for the UPA in the selection of the candidate for the President's post. In all probability, Uttar Pradesh 2007 could throw up a situation where the opinion of parties such as the S.P. and the BSP counts in the selection of the next President.