Uttar Pradesh & Identity Politics in 2022
India’s political and electoral ethos is carried by the big three of identity politics which are religion, region, and caste.
Although the modern Indian does cast his/her vote on policies of the party they agree with or they might like the party leader and think they are better for the country in the long-term. The identity factor is still a very big aspect of electoral campaign politics, especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
2017 and 2022
Although the Bhartiya Janta Party won 2017’s election with a landslide with 312 seats compared to Samajwadi Party’s 47 (lost 177 seats) and Bahujan Samaj Party’s 19 (lost 61 seats). The BJP gained 265 new seats compared to the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly Elections. This was dramatic and quite surprising at the time with the numbers that the BJP managed to swing. In 2022 however, things are different.
Most speculations favor the incumbent party, in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, and Goa. The farm-laws protests and the Lakhimpur-Kheri incident will have a big say in the elections in the voters’ collective minds. Also, the recent minister-rebels who resigned from the BJP, nine of them as of 14th January joined the Samajwadi Party led by Akhilesh Yadav with many saying that the OBC community was exploited and overshadowed. The resignations stroke a low blow to the BJP as it was all last moment and is still ongoing with reports saying many will quit in the upcoming days. There is now a possibility of close competition of seats and previous speculations may be highly inaccurate as of today. Tomorrow who knows?
Swami Prasad Maurya who was the first to jump ship is not an average leader in Uttar Pradesh, he was with the BSP for a long time and on the night of the UP elections, he announced a move to BJP with taking a lot of votes making BJP offer him a cabinet position in the Uttar Pradesh government. He has a lot of sway with the Maurya community and is an important OBC leader. Samajwadi Party has managed to gain more leaders from the BJP, Dharam Singh Saini and Awasthi Bala Prasad and Mukesh Varna are the recent names to have resigned from the BJP and are to join the Samajwadi Party favoring Akhilesh Yadav’s chances for the big seat. These leaders however are shown as certain community leaders with the media titling them ‘OBC leader’. This is not an ordinary phenomenon, it is because of the Identity politics media coverage in the state and the country.
Identity & Vote
The term Dalit formula is used to characterize a political campaign to sway the vote bank of Dalits (Scheduled Castes) alongside another group or a community. It was used in 2007 to describe the Bahujan Samaj Party’s successful social engineering plan to form a Brahmin-Dalit coalition and gain a popular vote on the basis of caste equality.
Many parties in Uttar Pradesh select candidates and offer ‘tickets’ based on their caste or identity because parties encourage a style of caste-centric voting. UP also has a history of caste-distinctive election results. Having approximately 41% OBC population, the role some parties like the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party play are important considering they were the biggest political parties before BJP got the popular vote in 2017. There are also smaller parties in the region that initially ally with the other big parties to gain a popular vote like Nishad Party and Apna Dal (both have confirmed alliance with the BJP in the upcoming elections).
2017 Legislative Assembly Elections were defined by the Hindutva wave and successfully managed to gain a popular vote. In 2022 there is a new yearning of rejecting the Hindutva card (or at least challenging it), this is making even the BJP perform old-fashioned caste unity tokenism where yesterday Yogi Adityanath went to have lunch at the residence of a member of the Scheduled Castes. It was a classic caste unity PR moment of duplicity. This practice is quite popular during the elections for a long time. Uttar Pradesh’s caste and sub-caste politics is complicated thing to understand. There are thousands of different communities and there's a certain understanding of Indian media that those communities’ votes belong to a certain party or leader. Although there are evidence backing majority votes in a community going to a certain party or leader on the basis of caste and surname, this media image of the Uttar Pradesh elections is disappointing considering we are in 2022 and there is very little talk of education, employment, and development. The concept of Identity and vote have existed in India since democratic elections were a thing.
In a video by BBC India featuring Dhruv Rathee exploring the caste-electoral climate in Bihar and asking people questions, there was a person who claimed that the vote is initially cast on the basis of caste or sub-caste believing that the candidate of their community will help them prevail. The people who Rathee interviewed were commoners and they explained that caste is a big aspect in Bihar elections explaining the still existing caste divide in Indian states. There are some differences compared to Uttar Pradesh as UP is the most populated state in India, there are 230 countries that have a lower population than UP. And as the population is high there are so many communities like the Yadavs, Kurnis, Rajbhars, Mauryas, Jats, Muslims. Community politics is identity politics based on caste and religion, the unity tokenism parties engage is just a highlight showing how much divided the people really are that they need to vote not on the basis of character or personality but because they are of ‘their own kind’.
Congress has also engaged in a form of identity politics that is gender-based. Priyanka Gandhi’s “Ladki Hu, Lad Sakti Hu” slogan and the campaigning of alluring women voters is a tedious play. Although all parties engage in campaigning for the female votes as more than 40% of voters in Uttar Pradesh are women. The Election Commission on January 5th released the voter list of Uttar Pradesh. The number of voters increased from 14.71 crores to 15.02 crores. There are over 8.04 crore male voters and over 6.98 crore female voters.
Mayawati and BSP
Mayawati has been contesting for the Chief Minister’s office since 1993, she is the person who advanced the use of the Dalit formula (after Mulayam Singh Yadav) or at least put it to use since the 90s and has been made Chief Minister in 1995 for 4 months with the alliance of Kanshi Ram, in 1997 for six months and in 2002 with support from the BJP for over a year until the party withdrew support. In the 2007 elections however the BSP won an absolute majority and declared Mayawati as the Chief Minister and was the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh to serve a full term.
In the 2012 Elections, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party gained 224 seats (gain of 127 seats) compared to BSP’s 80 seats (a loss of 126 seats). Mayawati is still a name in the 2022 Elections as her party is one of the biggest parties in the state. Although there is an absence of campaigning from Mayawati and it is an interesting set of circumstances. The BSP is not prioritizing the upcoming elections and one may wonder why. It has seen a mass exodus of leaders since it lost power in 2012 and 2017. Her absence from the main stage is taking away BSP vote share, the question this creates is of importance- where will the BSP core voters go as they have been diluting for a decade. Akhilesh Yadav’s SP has been strategic in gaining the BSP votes. This is likely to favor BJP but the limbo of BSP’s presence is an uneasy tension in the larger political scene.
All I can figure is that the Uttar Pradesh elections are one of the most important elections in India. And people may think that the importance is because the elections are tied to the General Elections which will take place in 2024. This theory was debunked by political strategist Prashant Kishor referencing to 2012 elections and saying it is not the case. The upcoming months will be interesting for the political landscape of India, as they always are during elections.
