Uttar Pradesh | Akhilesh puts Yogi on the mat – Read

It is, in fact, the “UP ke ladke”, as Rahul and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav are fondly called in UP, who have managed to do the ‘incredible’, stun the BJP despite the Ram temple and the Modi-Yogi double engine hype.
The Congress-SP alliance won 43 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats (SP 37 and Congress six), restricting the BJP-led NDA to just 36 seats in the state, a feat that has huge ramifications. UP had propelled Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2014, sending 71 BJP MPs to the Lok Sabha; in 2019, it helped him consolidate his grip by electing 62 party candidates, along with two of ally Apna Dal (S). This time, UP was meant to set the ball rolling for an even larger mandate, but that was not to be. Prime Minister Modi’s own victory margin of 152,513 votes in Varanasi—less than a third of the 479,000-odd he got in 2019—was prime evidence of how the BJP had lost the plot in UP.
Saffron gets a shock
Of the 12 members of the Union cabinet who contested again in UP, only five managed a return ticket to Parliament, among them PM Modi and defence minister Rajnath Singh. The list of those who fell by the wayside includes Smriti Irani in Amethi, Ajay Mishra Teni (whose son allegedly mowed down four people during the anti-farm laws protest) in Kheri and Sanjeev Balyan (an accused in the 2013 riots) in Muzaffarnagar. Irani’s defeat summed up the anti-BJP sentiment in some seats. She lost to Gandhi family loyalist Kishori Lal Sharma—who had been informed he was contesting just a day before the nominations—by over 167,000 votes.
But nothing could beat the loss in the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat, where Lord Ram seems to have deserted the BJP, despite the spectacular opening of a grand temple in his name in Ayodha in January. Having come good on a promise that was part of the manifesto in the previous election, the BJP had hoped to bask in the glory of its inauguration, and use it to set the tone for the national poll campaign. But the sureshot win the party candidate in Faizabad, two-time MP Lallu Singh, had hoped for turned into a loss against the SP’s Awadhesh Prasad, a nine-time MLA and one of the party’s key Dalit faces, by over 54,500 votes. Incidentally, Lallu was one of the BJP leaders who had talked up the need for the party to go char sau paar so that it could “change the Constitution”.
The saffron party also suffered heavy losses in western UP, despite its alliance with the regional Jat powerhouse, the Jayant Chaudhury-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). Of the 26 seats in the region, the NDA managed to win just 13 (five less than in 2019). Though the RLD won its two seats—Bijnor and Baghpat—the party, it seems, failed to deliver for the BJP in the region, especially in Muzaffarnagar and Kairana. This could create friction in the alliance especially as Balyan, the losing candidate in Muzaffarnagar, is said to be fuming. Another big result from the sugar belt was the victory of Chandrashekhar Azad of the fledgling Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) in the Nagina seat reserved for the Scheduled Castes. Even INDIA had dumped Azad, yet he won against all odds, taking on and beating the biggies as well as Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
What worked, what didn’t
While the BJP registered its biggest loss since 2014, the SP ended up as the biggest gainer, both in seats (37) and vote share (33.6 per cent). The Congress also increased its tally from one to six seats this time. The game-changer has been Akhilesh’s PDA (Pichhda, Dalit and Alpasankhyak) narrative and ticket distribution. The SP, which has always been known as the M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) party, borrowed the social engineering concept from the BJP and beat them at their own game. The party gave tickets to only five Yadavs (all Akhilesh family members) and four Muslims in a list of 62 candidates. Of the others, 10 were Kurmis and six from the Kushwaha-Maurya-Shakya-Saini castes (who had turned to the BJP as a refuge during the years of Yadav dominance). Its decision to field Dalit candidates in Meerut and Faizabad also paid off, while the alliance with the Congress was vital in enabling the Dalits to shift their votes to the SP, a party they had avoided since the ’90s. Crucially, this even included Jatavs, hitherto solidly loyal to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The Dalit vote for the Yadav party became the story of 2024.
The BJP’s ticket distribution, on the other hand, got flak even from the party’s inner circle. The top leadership’s decision to field 47 sitting MPs spiked the anti-incumbency vote. Also, unlike in 2019, it was the Congress-SP combine that succeeded in setting the narrative—that too around bruising issues like unemployment, feelings around it exacerbated by paper leaks, all-round inflation and the sense of the Constitution being in crisis. The BJP had no effective counter to these.
The party’s strategic allies in eastern UP, caste-based outfits like the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) and the Nishad Party, also failed to deliver. Voters in the region seemed to be fed up with the OBC and Dalit sub-segment loyalty narratives. The BJP think-tank has plenty to chew on over how UP led a heartland departure from its narratives, even if states like Madhya Pradesh held firm.
UP-based political analyst Dr Shilp Shikha Singh says, “Losing in Faizabad sent out a statement—that the communal appeal has limits. And anyway, it works best with a negative narrative. Building a temple is a positive development, it won’t build communal momentum.” She also cites the significance of the Dalit vote swing towards INDIA, fuelled by a threat perception around the constitutional architecture of reservations.
Anyone seen Mayawati?
The decimation of the BSP is also a story of this election. The party of the Dalits failed to open its account, and its vote share fell to single digits—9.4 per cent, a drop of three percentage points even from the 2022 assembly election. The impression that the party was the BJP’s B-team, even if an unwilling one, fostered a new phenomenon: the Jatavs, who make up over 50 per cent of the Dalit population in UP and have long been faithful to the BSP, drifted towards whoever they felt was their best succour: the Congress, SP and, in Nagina, the Azad Bhim Party. Chandrashekhar’s win in his debut election gives him a toehold in Dalit politics, as a long-term alternative to Mayawati.
Meanwhile, CM Yogi Adityanath will have to take part of the blame for the drastic reverses in his state. But since there is already some anger among the Rajputs at him being ‘sidelined’, the top leadership is unlikely to risk removing Yogi and stoking the flames further. A big challenge for the CM going forward will be how to play his cards in the state’s caste politics as also in terms of the economy. Sources close to Yogi say the focus will now be on job generation and getting investments in UP. How that pans out will be crucial to the future of UP politics, for one factor that went unambiguously in the INDIA bloc’s favour cuts across caste and community: the youth vote.
Question paper leaks and the uncertainty of the short-tenure Agnipath scheme contributed a lot to the disenchantment among this demographic. The two issues got a lot of traction during the campaigns of two young SP candidates—Pushpendra Saroj, 25, in Kaushambi and Priya Saroj, 25, in Machhlishehar. The two are now MPs and bear the responsibility of being part of a second-line leadership for the SP. The young leaders, though, credit party president Akhilesh for their victories. The 50-year old former chief minister of UP is now basking in the kudos from supporters and well-wishers. As one veteran put it, the SP chief has delivered a “dhobi pachhad” (a wrestling move where an unsuspecting rival is lifted off his feet and thrown on his back) on the BJP worthy of his late father, SP founder, former CM and kushti enthusiast Mulayam Singh Yadav.