Assembly Elections 2017: BJP dims BSP's chances among core voters

The BSP is not the first choice of most Muslims because they were skeptical of Mayawati’s past tendency to do business with the BJP and install herself as the chief minister if an electoral verdict was unclear. Tanveer Akhtar, a small farmer of Isauli in the Sultanpur district who supplemented his earnings by driving a hired car, said, “Mayawati remains suspect for us although she recently clarified she would rather sit out in the Opposition than go with the BJP. We can’t take her words on face value because she craves for power above everything else.”

But Akhtar’s misgivings about Mayawati were not shared by the other Muslims of his village. Mohammad Ismail Khan, who quit the SP recently and joined the BSP, likened the Muslim votes to a leavener that could augment a party’s vote share. “Assuming there are two quintals of grain on either side of a weighing scale. Our votes are like that extra two kg which when added to one of them will make the difference between a win and a defeat,” said Khan.

Khan’s colleague Zakir Hussain—who like him defected to the BSP from the SP-- protested the suggestion that cold mathematical calculations alone influenced the minority votes. “No, there are solid issues. The SP government did little to improve the state of the roads and schools. The unemployment dole that Akhilesh (Yadav) had promised before the last election never reached many genuine beneficiaries. On top of that, look at Akhilesh’s double standards. He campaigns for persons like Gayatri Prajapati and Arun Verma who are accused of rape and murder but throws out the so-called criminals Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmed. Is it because Ansari and Ahmed belong to a certain faith?” asked Hussain.

 Intra-faith differences also counted in certain seats like Rudauli in the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency. Here, the Muslims spoke of their preference for the BSP’s Haji Feroz Khan “Gabbar” over the SP’s Rushdie Mian because Khan is a Sunni and Rushdie Mian, a Shia. Shias are in a tiny minority in UP barring Lucknow.  The Shia-Sunni contradictions got the SP so worried that its best known Muslim face, Mohammad Azam Khan, made quite a few visits to Rudauli to tell the voters that “if you cut open the veins of Shias and Sunnis, the colour of the blood that flows is the same”.

Since after its spectacular showing in UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election—in which it managed to spirit away the SP’s core Yadav and the BSP’s Jatav votes—the BJP sedulously worked on a strategy to wean away the BSP’s Dalit votes other than those of the Jatavs, the sub-caste to which Mayawati belongs. The BJP’s premise was that Dalit sub-castes like the Passis, Khatiks and Valmikis, who also count numerically like the Jatavs, were easy prey because they were purportedly upset with Mayawati’s “Jatav-centered” politics.

The BJP’s Faizabad MP, Lalu Singh, why the strategy could possibly work. “The Passis are a militant grouping and count substantially in practically every seat in central UP. If you recall, in the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the Congress picked up most of its 22 seats in this region because it had focused on the Passis. You will see the difference their support has made to us in this election,” Singh claimed.

His claim was belied by the ground realities that prevailed in several villages, post-demonetisation. Across sub-caste divisions, it was the Dalits, more than any other community, who complained that “note bandi” had hit them seriously. At Pahurawan village in the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency, Dharam Raj, a Passi locomotive pilot in the railways, wondered if the Modi government would leave him with anything at all after taxing the bank withdrawals. “I earn quote well but the tax I pay on the withdrawals are shrinking my savings,” said Raj. Like many other Passis in his village, he said he preferred the BSP over the other parties.

Caste equations apart, the other cachet Mayawati carried was her record as an administrator, particularly on the law and order front. With the BJP unleashing a high decibel campaign on the alleged murders and rapes in the SP regime, interspersed with provocative slogans, few, if any, presently mentioned that Mayawati had cracked down on hard core criminals in politics such as Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja “Bhaiyya” who looked set to win from his borough in Kunda.