BJP is all over UP again: Captures power in there other states
Lucknow/New Delhi: The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was all over the states where counting was held Thursday as the party managed to get control of four states but lost Punjab to AAP.
Yogi Adityanath will return as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh with the BJP – a first for India’s most politically vital state in 37 years – with an ever bigger vote share than last time, as election results were declared on Thursday.
The BJP has shored up 44.6 per cent of the vote – a significant 4 per cent improvement over the 2017 elections.
Addressing party workers at the state headquarters after the poll results and trends showed a clear BJP majority, Adityanath said, “People have buried the politics of caste and religion by ensuring the victory of BJP and its allies in Uttar Pradesh under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
Seemingly taking a dig at Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav for raising questions over Electronic Voting Machines or EVMs, he said the “misleading” campaign run by the opposition over the past two-three days have been set aside by the people who reposed faith in the good governance of the BJP.
The Samajwadi Party, trailing with roughly half the seats of the BJP, gained over the last election but fell far short of the party’s expectations.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress were leading in five and four seats respectively. The Apna Dal (Sonelal) was leading in 11 seats and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in seven, according to latest trends.
With 80 parliamentary seats, Uttar Pradesh holds the key to power at the centre and could offer clues to the national mood before the 2024 general election.
Home to about a fifth of India’s 135 crore people, UP sends the most legislators to parliament of any state.
A majority for the BJP would make it the first party to get a consecutive second term in more than three decades.
The Samajwadi Party, considered the biggest challenger of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, had stitched up a diverse coalition with smaller parties which it had hoped would supplement its Muslim-Yadav support base with voters from the Other Backward Classes.
Exit polls had predicted a comfortable majority for the BJP, despite the government’s much-criticised handling of COVID-19, high unemployment, and anger over farm reforms that were cancelled last year after protests.
The BJP has long predicted it would retain the state because of policies such as free staples for the poor during the pandemic, a crackdown on crime, and its appeal to Hindu voters.
The scoreboard after the latest round of assembly elections is confirmation, if more was needed, that the BJP is the primary pole of this country’s politics. At one time, it now seems very long ago, India’s polity was described as a one-party dominant system, with a Congress which was more a coalition than a party, its centrepiece.
That time is long gone, the Congress is inexorably becoming a paler and more shrunken shadow of itself. And a BJP that got new life with the ascent of Narendra Modi at its top in 2014, is notching up achievements.
With this round of elections, it has all but upended one of the last few caveats to its spectacular success – the party is yet to conquer the country’s south, barring Karnataka, it is pointed out, and even elsewhere, its performance in the states does not match up to its dominance of the Centre.
While the south remains a challenge for the BJP, its decisive victories in four out of the five just-concluded assembly elections, including and especially UP, have, at least for now, put paid to the latter criticism. In politically crucial UP, the Yogi Adityanath government has become the first to get a consecutive second term in more than three decades.
The BJP’s formidable electoral successes are a result of larger changes on the ground and they also serve to deepen the new currents and transitions. In UP, fighting as an incumbent, it had etched its pitch and appeal clearly: One, a promise of “suraksha (safety)” that melds the promise of stricter law and order at the local level with the pledge of a more self-conscious nationalism and harder national security, both backed by the redefinition of the state as a less forgiving, more retributive entity.
Two, the state as the provider of direct transfers and schemes to the citizen as labharthi or beneficiary – in UP, the free ration scheme had touched large sections in a time of severe economic distress exacerbated by a public health emergency, but there were other schemes too that had reached those who had not felt touched by the state before, from Ujjwala gas cylinders to PM Kisan Samman Nidhi to toilets. And three, a Hindutva both more assertive and insecure. In UP, the BJP has stoked a cultural and religious consciousness that feels it was long denied its due in echelons of power and in public spaces and feels that its moment has finally come.
KV Online
