My take on UP poll scene (as written on March 21, 2014)

                Uttar Pradesh, with 80 Lok Sabha seats, has held a lot of significance in the electoral politics of our nation. It is not only the size but also the nature of the political discourse in this state – the cradle of the vedic civilization and all the social factors emerging from there – has lent a certain dynamic to the elections there. In simple terms, politics of Uttar Pradesh has been determined so much by caste factors and the alignment between castes.

                It is also a fact that the Upper Castes that dominated the discourse here in the couple of decades since independence have been marginalized since the 1990s; and the discourse there have witnessed the emergence of the Other Backward Classes and the Dalits to the fore. That Uttar Pradesh has been the only state where a Dalit exclusivist party – the BSP – could win a majority in the State Assembly is a fact that establishes the substantial changes that have been witnessed in Independent India’s political discourse.

                One may argue that members from the Dalit community have become Chief Ministers elsewhere too. A case in point is T.Anjaiah in Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s. But he was a nominee of the Congress high command as distinct from Mayawati who led the challenge and a certain kind of Dalit assertion in the political discourse.  All this is history. Let us now come to the prognosis from this state for the elections 2014.

                To say that the Congress is not a major player in UP is to state the obvious. This process began in the 1960s and was pronounced in the 1990s, in what can be described as the Mandal era. In the elections of 1989, the Congress lost heavily to the Janata Dal; riding the wave of anti-corruption campaign (Bofors) but also marked by a coming together of key leaders seen as representing the Upper Caste Rajputs (V.P.Singh and Chandrashekar) with such OBC leaders and legatees of the Lok Dal (behind which the OBCs had consolidated) as  Mulayam Singh Yadav. Then came the BJP’s resurgence in the 1991 elections and the Upper Caste base that the Congress enjoyed, rather than returning to it, went with the BJP in the post-Mandal phase.

                This continued through the 1990s and the Dalits, who too went with the Janata Dal in the earlier phase, got on to support the BSP under Kanshi Ram and later on by Mayawati. The other large chunk, in terms of votes, being the Muslim community left the Congress post-Babri Masjid demolition and began chosing either Mulayam Singh in UP or Mayawati. The BJP, after riding on the post-Congress wave and making gains began to lose out since 2004. The NDA government of 1998 and 1999 was possible only because the BJP won a large number of seats; as much as 50 out of the 85 then The party scored poorly in 2004 and hence had to bow out. It was not different in 2009 too and the BJP’s losses were gains for the Congress.

                It will be a miracle if the Congress crosses half a dozen seats in Uttar Pradesh this time. And this will be a steep fall from the 21 seats it won in 2009. The question, however, is whether the BJP will be able to wrest all the seats that the Congress loses from Uttar Pradesh and also whether the Narendra Modi wave that the party is expecting to ride will help the party snatch seats from the Samajwadi Party’s kitty of 23 seats and the BSP’s 20. Well. Going by conventional wisdom which means to read the situation on the basis of the caste factor, the answer can only be an emphatic NO.

                There is very little evidence from the ground, in Uttar Pradesh, to suggest that caste as a category has simply vanished. The fact is that caste played its role, in as significant manner as it did earlier in the elections to the State Assembly in 2012. Two years since then is too short a period to expect the world in UP turning upside down and Modi effecting that transformation. In other words, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party remain as relevant and strong as they were a decade ago (in 2004, the SP inflicted a stunning blow upon the BJP) and so did the BSP.

                Given this, it is most likely that the outcome this time could be on the following lines: The Samajwadi Party and the BSP retaining the number of Lok Sabha seats as they won in 2009; 23 and 20 respectively sharing more than half the number of seats from Uttar Pradesh between themselves. The Congress losing substantially; its number could slide down to a mere half dozen from the 21 seats it won in 2009. And at least a chunk of these will fall in the BJP’s kitty, thanks to Narendra Modi and the buoyancy he has managed to effect on the BJP cadre’s morale; in other words, the party could secure upward of 20 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh; but certainly less than 30 seats from the State.