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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claims to have enrolled 20 million of Uttar Pradesh's140 million electors as its members during its membership drive - every seventh elector in India's most populous state is now a BJP member. But the numbers have brought little comfort to an increasingly nervous party state unit, particularly in the crucial western UP region that had formed the bedrock of BJP's 2014 Lok Sabha success.
State party leaders, including its legislators, have conveyed to the central leadership the uphill task that faces the BJP in repeating its spectacular 2014 performance in the state Assembly elections, due two years from now.
Twenty-four months might look like a long duration, but not for BJP's UP unit leaders. They have told the national leadership that the BJP-led government at the Centre has taken one misstep after another in recent months to change people's perception about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership, which in May 2014 won the party, along with its ally Apna Dal, 73 of UP's 80 Lok Sabha seats - 337 (including Apna Dal's nine) of the 403 Assembly segments.
That success of the BJP was rooted in western UP, particularly when the dominant Jat and sizable Dalit communities of the region shifted their allegiance respectively from Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to the BJP. In 2014, the BJP held sway across 24 of the 27 seats in western UP. But a recent visit to the region indicated widespread disillusionment against the Modi government. There were rows of empty chairs when the local BJP organised a farmers' rally in Kharkhauda, in the vicinity of Meerut, after a farmer committed suicide in end-April when his crop was damaged due to unseasonal rains.
The people of the region, and not just the Jats, are upset with the Modi government not having delivered on its promises. Sugarcane is the lifeblood of the landholding Jat community. The list of complaints include non-payment of sugarcane dues for almost two years and a meagre increase in minimum support price of wheat and rice by Rs 50 per quintal as against the promised 50 per cent profit over the cost of production.
What is further pushing the game away from BJP is the losing battle of perception over its "anti-farmer" land Bill. The delay in the central financial assistance reaching farmers affected by recent hailstorm and unseasonal rains, which destroyed large tracts of wheat crop primarily in the western parts and frequent farmer suicides, have added to the disenchantment.
Bharat Singh, the BJP member of Parliament from Balia, was one of the first to flag all that was going wrong with the party's preparedness in UP. At a parliamentary party meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 7, Singh, egged on by MPs from western UP, said central government schemes were not reaching the towns and villages of UP and that Union ministers were inaccessible.
The criticism goaded central leaders to visit UP more often. BJP National Vice-President Om Mathur, party in-charge for UP, held a meeting with party MLAs and Sangh leaders in the third week of June in Lucknow. He lauded party leaders for working to increase the membership from 3.3 million to 20 million, and for having significantly exceeded the target of 15 million. He said the party is going about its preparations for the 2017 polls with clockwork precision - that it has already appointed 'polling booth pravasis' or managers to 94,000 of the 1,40,000 polling booths in the state, and also started selecting candidates for the 403 Assembly seats.
But few of the three-dozen-odd party MLAs reciprocated Mathur's positivity. They told him how farmers were blaming the Modi government, and not the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) government of UP, for the delayed financial assistance promised for their crop loss. "Karte woh hain aur hamein gaali khaani padh rahi hai (It's SP's fault but we are getting the blame)," a senior BJP legislator from western UP said.
Sangh leaders have conveyed that the BJP was losing the inroads it had made in the Lok Sabha elections among the other backward classes (OBC) and Dalit support base of the SP and BSP.
Mathur's feedback on his return to Delhi made party chief Amit Shah schedule a visit to the state to oversee the "mahasampark" or contact programme in mid-July. On June 30, Shah attended a meeting of the Rs 20,000-crore 'Namami Gange' project, chaired by Union minister Uma Bharti. The BJP hopes that the project will help it reach out to an estimated 60 million people, mostly Dalits and OBCs, who rely for their livelihoods on the river. Nearly half of this estimated 60 million live near the banks of the Ganga in UP. On Friday, the BJP chief appointed five co-incharges to help Mathur in his work. These were Virendra Khatik, Rameshwar Chaurasiya, Ramesh Bidhuri, Satyendra Kushwaha and Sunil Ojha. Barring Ojha, the other four hail from OBC and Dalit communities.
The BJP has also been holding protests and demonstrations across the state against the "misrule" of the SP government. It organised protests at the tehsil level from June 24 to 27 and district level from June 29 to July 1. But lack of cohesion among state unit leaders and absence of effective cadre at the grassroots level is hurting the party. The BJP finds itself in a situation similar to the Congress in the 2012 polls. Then Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi had frenetically campaigned against the then Mayawati government. But the absence of strong party cadre meant a young Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party exploited the anti-incumbency to notch up a rare full majority.
Already, common men and women reminisce about the efficient Mayawati administration. Munna Khan, a middle-aged paan-beedi seller outside a state cooperative sugar mill on National Highway 58 in Meerut, said how the Mayawati government saved thousands of jobs when it intervened to stop the sale of the mill to a private company. Today, the sugar mill is among very few in western UP to have made full payment to farmers. "In this hour of crisis, this sugar mill has stood out for good performance," Khan said. Salesmen and traders in the region complain of plummeting sales during the April-June period due to crop damage and non-payment of dues by sugar cooperatives with the Modi government having done little to deliver on its promises.
The misgivings of the region's farmers, mostly the Jats, over the contentious land acquisition Bill have added to BJP's perception problems. Western UP has one of the highest per capita landholdings in the entire state and is a direct beneficiary of the Green Revolution outside the Punjab-Haryana food bowl. Per-capita landholding in western UP is three-four hectares, compared with the average landholding being a mere 0.83 hectare for the entire state. Larger landholdings also mean that growers stand to lose more in case of forcible acquisitions and given that the area is one of the most prosperous in the entire state, the per hectare cost of land is the much more than anywhere else in UP.
The 2014 exception aside, the BJP has consistently struggled to reach number three in terms of seats and vote shares in state polls and Lok Sabha elections since 2004. The state unit fears the worst in the 2017 polls, but the central leadership has put in place a plan that helped its 2014 success. It is busy inducting more and more activists from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to man its polling booth units and reach out to the electorate instead of relying on existing BJP leaders infamous for infighting.
| THE IMPORTANCE OF WESTERN UP |
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Western UP elects 27 of UP's 80 Lok Sabha MPs and 136 of its 403 legislators. Its share of total seats may only be a third, but the region exercises immense financial clout and is the most prosperous part of the state.
The BJP had performed poorly in the region in the 2007 and 2012 Assembly polls as well as the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Critics say the party found support of non-traditional BJP voters like the Jats and Dalits of the region after the communal polarisation after the September 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar.
The party won 24 of the 27 Lok Sabha seats of the region, losing only the Firozabad, Mainpuri and Badaun seats to the Samajwadi Party.
