Assembly elections: Battle for political legacy in Uttar Pradesh

Discontent among labarthees and livelihood issues might deny the BJP a repeat of its 2017 dream run in the state

Since the 2017 Uttar Pradesh (UP) and the 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assiduously raised an electoral constituency of the labarthee or beneficiaries of the Centre’s and the state government’s targeted welfare schemes and doles.

The Pradhan Mantri (PM) Awas Yojana, money for constructing toilets, the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) connections to below-the-poverty-line families, the Jan Dhan Yojana, PM Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan), and rations that were distributed after the onset of the pandemic were the marquee schemes from the Centre that were monitored hawk-like by the Yogi Adityanath government. These programmes are as integral a part of the BJP’s election blueprint as the propagation of Hindutva and social coalitions. The party wants to ensure that not only does its labarthee constituency remain intact, but it has encompassed the hitherto untouched.

What do the voices from the ground say?

At Salempur Naglakhar village in the Tundla Assembly seat (Firozabad district), voters directed their ire at the Centre and the UP government for the “mess-up”.

“An LPG refill costs nearly Rs 1,000. Some of us have gone back to our chulha chaukhi. The PM-Kisan is touted as a gift of the gods, but what is Rs 2,000 thrice a year, when everything costs so much, especially electricity? We need employment, not sops. I am idle two years after graduation. I took up work as a thermos operator at a glass factory, but that shut down during the pandemic,” says Durgesh Kumar, who interestingly came from a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-aligned family.

Nearly half of Firozabad’s 330 glass factories — the backbone of its economy — folded up since 2020.

In Raja ka Taal village, falling in the Shikhoabad Assembly constituency, the labarthees of the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana for Antyodaya card-holders (5 kilos, or kg, of wheat/rice per person and 1 kg dal per household), supplemented by the UP government’s handout of 1 litre cooking oil and 1 kg each of salt and sugar, alleged in places private dealers “quietly” took over the distribution from state ration shops, pocketed a portion of their benefits and served “adulterated” stuff.

Satyam Singh Chauhan, a BJP vistarak (a junior pracharak in the Sangh’s lexicon), insisted the charge was untrue. “We took care to see only government ration dealers distributed the produce because under previous governments, private parties cheated the beneficiaries.”

As many as 59 seats, spanning the region from Firozabad, Etah, Mainpuri, and Etawah southward to Bundelkhand, voted on February 20 in the third round of polls. The region embraces a swathe of what is popularly known as “Mulayam Singh Yadav country” because Saifai, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) patriarch was born, and Jaswant Nagar, which he represented in the legislature from 1985 to 1993, are part of Etawah.

Indeed, Etawah owes its place on the political map to the Yadav clan. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is contesting from Karhal (Mainpuri) and Mulayam’s younger brother Shivpal Singh Yadav is standing from Jaswant Nagar, the family fief, which he retained amid the BJP wave five years ago.

The once dominant Yadavs got a blow in 2017, when of the 29 seats in their putative borough, 23 were won by the BJP, leaving just six for them. The BJP made a clean sweep of the 13 seats in Bundelkhand’s Jhansi, Jalaun, Hamirpur, Lalitpur, and Mahoba districts.

Akhilesh, who initially toyed with the idea of contesting from an Assembly seat in Azamgarh, his LS constituency, eventually settled for Karhal. “The idea was to send a positive signal to the voters of this region. They felt abandoned once Mulayam stopped contesting from Jaswant Nagar,” an SP source said.

The SP’s own assessment was that in 2017, 25 per cent of the Yadavs abandoned the party. “Many of them were gripped by the Modi wave. Secondly, Shivpal started to feel sidelined by Akhilesh and was not active anywhere except his own seat,” the source said.

Shivpal was the SP’s main organisational hand, who was credited by Mulayam with raising the edifice, brick by brick.

He quit the SP before the 2019 LS polls, floated his party Pragatisheel SP (Lohiya), and damaged its prospects in this belt. The prodigal son recently made up with Akhilesh and returned home. Pitted against Akhilesh was the Agra Member of Parliament Satya Pal Singh Baghel, who was once in the SP as a trusted aide of Mulayam. He was initially part of Mulayam’s security apparatus.

Unemployment was flagged in a big way by the SP in this round. “It’s not just about the closure of the glass industries,” said Kaptan Singh Yadav, the SP’s spokesperson, adding, “It’s also about the several thousand vacancies that went unfulfilled in the government sector, which is still the biggest source of jobs for young people.”

UP Chief Minister Adityanath recognised the gravity of the situation. In July 2021, his government initiated the recruitment process for 74,000 vacancies in various departments as well as for 30,000, 17,000, and 27,000 posts, respectively, in subordinate, secondary, and higher education. The results are not known.

According to Santosh Mehrotra, a human development economist who researches UP, the overall unemployment rate increased 2.5x and youth joblessness nearly 5x since 2012.

Other episodes blotted the scenario. The UP Teachers’ Eligibility Test 2021 to recruit primary and upper primary teachers in state government schools was called off once the question paper was out in November 2021. A month later, when the candidates protested in Lucknow, police cracked down on them.

Discontent among the labarthees and livelihood issues might deny the BJP a repeat of its 2017 dream run in the third round.