UP polls 2017: Will PM Modi, Hindutva trump caste divisions in eastern UP?

In the election of 1993 that followed the demolition of the Babri mosque and was widely interpreted as a verdict on the act, Azamgarh turned its back on the BJP.  With an 84.06 per cent Hindu population as against 15.58 percent Muslim, Azamgarh was a terrain that the BJP could have broken into, considering that it won several other seats in west and central UP having a far larger Muslim electorate.  In the current elections, the BJP’s rivals from the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) conceded that it was in “serious” contest in three seats, Lalganj, Atraulia and Mehnagar.

The BJP’s ingress was made possible by two factors: one, a sentiment shared by the Hindus that Azamgarh ought to shed the “negative” tag that was hung on it after the Delhi police had chased and killed two young men from the district in Batla House, suspecting that they were Indian Mujahideen accomplices who triggered the serial blasts in the national capital on September 13, 2008. Two, in these elections, the BJP, tutored by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), fought each seat as though it had to be wrested, regardless of whether it was Azamgarh or Raebareli, the Nehru-Gandhi fief. 

An RSS “pracharak” (propagandist), who is part of a team overseeing the elections from Lucknow, said, “Barring two or three places, east UP has never favoured the BJP. When these elections began, we decided we will not stage the symbolic contests of the past but go for a real, no-holds-barred fight in every seat.”

An analysis of the state elections since 1991-- when the Congress’s hegemony over UP weakened, challenged as it was by the rise of the BJP, the Janata Dal and later the SP and the BSP-- showed that of the 14 districts that await polling, the BJP consistently chalked up its gains from Gorakhpur, Deoria, Varanasi, Mirzapur and Robertsganj. Those like Ballia, Ghazipur, Mau, Azamgarh and Maharajganj were unreceptive to its leadership, rhetoric and programmes. Election 2017 could turn the BJP’s luck around in this neck of the woods.

In the “campaign” to “redeem” Azamgarh’s image, as it were, people did not invoke the legacies the town had inherited through the legends it birthed such as Rahul Sankrityayan, writer, linguist, Indologist and Marxist theoretician and Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi. They seemed convinced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi alone could step up to the plate. “Modiji can clean up the reputation and see to it that people don’t look suspiciously when we say we are from Azamgarh. He is the ideal person to restore law and order and protect the ‘izzat’ (honour) of our mothers and sisters from being preyed on,” said Radhey Shyam Chouhan, a 55-year-old transporter in Chakmojam village near Azamgarh. The BJP themed its discourse on the Samajwadi Party’s “bad” law and order management on two subjects: women’s “security” and stemming the “migration” of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas to “escape persecution”. The latter resonated in western UP while the former found takers like Chouhan in the east.

In conflating Modi’s image and persona with the BJP’s ideology and politics, his supporters were unconcerned about the odds the BJP might be up against for not declaring a chief ministerial candidate, accounting for the conduct of its Lok Sabha MPs that was rated almost uniformly as “indifferent” or responding to the hits wrought by demonetisation.

Parasnath Yadav, a resident of Azamgarh’s Kotila suburb, explained why Modi was the season’s flavour. “We are not bothered about who the BJP’s CM will be if it is voted to power. We are looking towards Modi. Other world leaders give speeches out of prepared texts. Modi holds his head high, stares his audience in the face and speaks without papers,” said Yadav, who taught science in a secondary school and maintained that he was not a beneficiary of the largesse the SP government had purportedly showered on the Yadavs.

But Modi’s image was the not the only reason for the perceptible tilt towards the BJP. The party worked hard on getting the social math right in the rural areas.

At  Samedha village on Azamgarh’s periphery, the RSS and the BJP have tasked the upper caste Thakur voters, constituting 800 of the 8,000 voters, to ensure that the non-Yadav backward castes such as the Rajbhars and Koeris will stay put with them. “The dynamic is simple. If we are not with the BJP, the  backward castes will not come to it,” said a Thakur resident who sought anonymity.    

However, the interplay of personalities, caste and Hindutva yielded other trends that did not always place Modi as the frontispiece of the narrative. Ghazipur lawyer Awadesh Rai for one believed it was his constituency’s MP, Manoj Sinha (BJP), who principally caused a buzz around the BJP in east UP with his “development” agenda. Rai said as the junior railways and communications minister, Sinha expanded the rail network, pumped in huge railway investments and most importantly, brought to Modi’s notice a long forgotten report  prepared in 1964 by HM Patel at Jawaharlal Nehru’s behest. The report was set in motion when in 1962, the Congress’s Ghazipur MP, Vishwanath Singh Gahmari drew Parliament’s attention to the deprivation in east UP that, he said, forced the Dalits to pick on grains found in cow dung to eat. On February 27,  speaking in Mau Modi reminded his audience about Gahmari and claimed while the Patel report went into oblivion, he would retrieve and act on it.

“Development will overcome Hindutva and caste,” stressed Rai.

In the fight to gain control of east UP, the BJP was up against a rejuvenated BSP that banked on Mau-Ghazipur’s weighty Muslim politician, Mukhtar Ansari, to spirit away the minority votes from the SP. Ansari was set to merge his party, the Qaumi Ekta Dal, with the SP, but Akhilesh Yadav stalled the move. Ansari joined the BSP thereafter.

The BSP’s confidence to challenge the BJP with a coalition of Muslim and Dalit votes grew as the SP’s unpopularity surfaced visibly with each passing day. In Mirzapur and Bhadohi, the SP’s publicity vans were chased out of villages. People poked fun at its hashtag “kam bolta hai” (work speaks) and asked, what is the work that speaks? To counter the adverse reaction, SP workers have fanned out to tell people that if the party is re-elected, their first task will be to give them hand pumps and build rural roads.