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| First-time voters at Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday. Fifty-six seats went to the polls for the third phase, which saw a voter turnout of 57 per cent. (PTI) |
New Delhi, Feb. 15: The BJP, which has run a low-key campaign in Uttar Pradesh, hopes to emerge as the “dark horse” in the quadrangular fight for power.
Party president Nitin Gadkari has largely carried the electioneering on his shoulders and minimised deployment of central leaders, including L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.
BJP sources said they “deliberately” avoided the temptation to “carpet-bomb” the state, as they had done in previous elections, and court the media. “Media hype has not helped us, the 2004 India Shining saga is a salutary reminder,” a source said.
Gadkari also resisted the clamour from sections of the BJP to use Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the campaign in the belief that his “reinvented image as a development man” might lure young voters.
“He feared if Modi was brought in, the Muslim votes, which look like they are scattering, might consolidate behind the Congress,” a source said. Especially since court hearings in the 2002 riots cases are on in Gujarat, and Modi’s government is in the dock.
Modi has reportedly told confidants he is “not interested” in going to Uttar Pradesh because he will soon be preoccupied with the budget session in his Assembly.
The party’s growing belief that it could pip the Congress to the third place and even come a close second to the BSP or the Samajwadi Party — depending on which of them is on top — stems from three factors: the high urban turnout, the Congress’s “over-emphasis” on minority quota and the RSS’s support.
Other elements the BJP believes will work in its favour are the discreet presence of Sanjay Joshi, the former general secretary who is seen as a quintessential organisation hand with “strong” ideological moorings in the mould of K.N. Govindacharya, and Uma Bharti joining the campaign.
The BJP and the Congress have attributed the higher voter presence in the towns and cities to “general disillusionment” with the Samajwadi and the BSP and as a tilt towards them.
But in many places in Avadh and eastern Uttar Pradesh, an oft-echoed comment about the BJP was that had it not inducted Mayawati’s controversial reject Babu Singh Kushwaha, it could have fared “substantially better”. The feeling was that a party which publicly supported Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement and was beginning to “look good” to the urban upper castes had bungled by welcoming a minister sacked for corruption.
Indeed, an Uttar Pradesh BJP leader said it was “premature” to read too much in the urban turnout. “It could also be the result of Rahul Gandhi’s aggressive electioneering or the reported popularity of Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s scion),” he said.
Uma Bharti’s induction, her association with the Hindutva strand in the BJP’s politics and the Congress’s build-up on the minority quota were calculated to achieve a communal polarisation in Uttar Pradesh’s backward caste votes.
But BJP sources said their plan faltered when Muslims refused to bite the 4.5 per cent quota (later enlarged into a promised 9 per cent by law minister Salman Khurshid) and dismissed it as a “lollipop”. “Had the Muslims reacted enthusiastically, there might have been a reaction among the backward caste Hindus,” a source said.
What has helped the BJP is the relatively uncontroversial ticket distribution, the absence of local-level dissidence and rebellion (barring Gorakhpur where the MP, Yogi Adityanath, initially refrained from campaigning because some of his nominees were denied tickets), and the refusal to project a face.
On the flip side, state leaders such as Rajnath Singh and Kalraj Mishra, miffed by Gadkari’s reluctance to foreground them, have stayed in the wings.
The relatively low profile they have adopted implies that the Thakur and Brahmin votes they might have swung in huge numbers have gone to an extent to the Samajwadi Party wherever its candidates looked strong enough to defeat the BSP.
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