UP win has made 2024 task easy
Vinod Chandrashekhar Dixit
The 2022 assembly election has turned out to be one of the most interesting election battles in the country. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has emerged as the central figure in the electoral contest.
For BJP in Uttar Pradesh, Yogi is a strength. It is clear that the state polls was a crucial test for PM Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party before national elections in 2024.
The party scored a record win in politically crucial Uttar Pradesh. The BJP and its allies have won a massive mandate in Uttar Pradesh under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi. The BJP came to power in the 2014 general election, when India was in the midst of an economic downturn.
BJP leader, NarendraModi, cast himself as the right man in the right place at the right time. BJP is determined to fulfill the expectations and aspirations of the people of Uttar Pradesh. The BJP’s numbers in the state are emphatic and even Adityanath scored big, winning the Gorakhpur Urban constituency by over one lakh votes.
PM Modi at the victory speech following BJP’s performance in UP has rightly said that UP chose ‘vikas’, proved wrong all who said it votes for caste. In UP it is for the first time since independence that a CM has completed a full term and got re-elected. Also for the first time in 37 years, since 1985, BJP is the only party to get re-elected.
The BJP has won a second successive victory in the UP elections. With intensified vote polarisation, control over the media narrative and immense power, the BJP retained the most populous state though with a reduced majority.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, looks likely to stay in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hands, despite the ravages of Covid and a plummeting economy. The state is a home to about a fifth of India’s 1.35 billion people and sends the most legislators to parliament from any state.
The BJP’s claim of overhauling the law and order situation and development projects in Kashi, Mathura, and Varanasi seems to have worked in its favour. While the BJP threw a pantheon of star campaigners, AkhileshYadav was virtually the lone face of his Samajwadi Party in the Uttar Pradesh elections.
Modi and other BJP politicians have created a vibe of pride across many parts of India, especially among the youth. Under Modi’s leadership, the BJP has also strengthened its electoral operations, engineered broad-based social coalitions, and struck useful alliances with smaller regional parties. What is unusual about the BJP is that it is not simply a political party. It is the political expression of a family of Hindu nationalist organizations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar.
BJP stands strong in all the four regions in which the state was divided. BJP is benefitted in two consecutive LokSabha elections by pitching PM NarendraModi as its face. Yogi is projected as a non-corrupt image of his government where ‘compromises’ were not made to placate a leader or a group. He is emerging as the second-most popular mass leader in the BJP after Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After becoming chief minister in March 2017, Yogi Adityanath has cultivated an image of a PAN-Uttar Pradesh leader touring all parts of the state.
(The author is a columnist and hails from Ahmedabad. The views expressed are his own)
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