How Mayawati split the opposition to enable Modi's BJP win in Uttar Pradesh
Pearceful protest in Delhi against the proposed Citizenship Act, 2021
March 12, 2022
Once again, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state legislative elections due to the Hindu votes being split along caste lines that favored its candidates.
With a population of around 230 million, UP is the key state to winning the parliamentary elections in India. Like most Prime Ministers before him, Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP, was elected to parliament from UP, from Varanasi constituency.
About 60% of the state’s voters cast their votes in the legislative poll, which concluded earlier this month. The BJP and its allies won 273 of the 403 seats, down from 325 which they won in the previous election in 2017.
Election results in India are based on which party’s candidate wins the most votes in each constituency, and not on a proportional representation of the total votes received by each party. The BJP was hence able to win more than two thirds of the seats with 41% of the votes - which was a gain of roughly one percent compared to 2017.
The Samajwadi Party (SP) and its allies, the major opponent of the BJP, received 35% of the votes, up from 22% in 2017. But the SP and its allies, led by Akhilesh Yadav, won less than a third of the seats -125 seats, though this was one and a half times greater than their tally in 2017. Those who voted for the SP this year included Yadavs and some from the Jat Hindu sub-castes as well as the Muslims.
Clearly, based on the relative share of votes of the two main contestants, the BJP once again benefitted from a split of the anti-BJP votes. The major role in the vote split was played by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). It came in third with about 13% of the votes, but won only one seat. A minor player was the Congress Party, led by Rahul Gandhi, the son, grandson and great grandson of former Indian Prime Ministers. The Congress got 2% of the votes and two seats.
The BSP got two thirds of the votes of the Dalits, or lower castes, who make up about a fifth of the state’s population. Its leader Mayawati ran the UP government as Chief Minister from 2007 to 2012, and earlier for three brief periods. From 1995 to 2012, her ownership of land, homes and other assets rose a hundred-fold to over $14 million. She explained this was due to donations from her supporters, according to a report in The Hindu.
Both Mayawati and Gandhi said they were keen on defeating the BJP. "Dalits, backwards (Hindu castes) and especially Muslim communities have been living in fear and terror under this (BJP) government,” Mayawati said at an election campaign rally in February.
But she, as well as Gandhi, did not agree to share seats with Yadav’s party and ensure that only a single major opposition candidate would contest against the BJP in each constituency. As a result, the anti-BJP vote was split three ways. Indeed, this was the election strategy of the BJP leaders. They promoted Mayawati as a leader of “political relevance” in the state, to try and boost her votes and enlarge the split of the anti-BJP votes.
After the election results were announced, Mayawati denied that her party was “the BJP’s B-team.” Yet, there is speculation over if, and how, she may be rewarded by the BJP, or its supporters, for successfully splintering the opposition votes and enabling the BJP to win.
Mayawati blamed her party’s poor performance on the lack of support from the Muslims. This, she said, resulted in some of the Dalits joining the upper-caste Hindus and other Hindu castes to vote for the BJP because if Yadav and his SP “comes to power, there will be jungle raj (lawless rule) once again,” reported the Indian Express.
BJP leaders also campaigned asking Hindus to unite and defeat Yadav to preserve law and order, apparently a code word to prevent Muslim leaders from sharing power in a government led by Yadav. A BJP leader told campaign rallies that Yadav had put up gangsters as candidates, and that, if elected, Yadav would release Muslim criminals who are in jail. Yogi Adityanath, a saffron-robed militant Hindu monk who leads Modi’s party in the state, “sought to frame the election as a fight between its Hindu majority and the minority Muslim population,” noted The Washington Post.
SP leader Yadav was the state’s chief minister from 2012 to 2017. He earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Mysore University, India, and a degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia.
In addition to benefitting from the split in opposition votes, caused by Mayawati, the BJP secured the votes of about a third of the Dalit voters, especially in the poorer eastern region of the state. One rumor reportedly going around, to try and attract Dalit voters to the BJP, was that the farmland, homes and other assets of the Muslims would be redistributed among the lower castes after the Muslims were driven out.
Apparently the rumor arose after Hindu extremist monks took an oath to turn India into a Hindu nation, if needed by killing Muslims. This oath was taken at a gathering in Haridwar, Jharrkhand state, in December, two months prior to the state elections in UP as well as in neighboring Jharkhand. Those who took the oath included some influential monks with close ties to the BJP as well as BJP members, according to news reports.
Since Modi first got elected as Prime Minister in 2014, India’s 200 million Muslims have faced rising discrimination and violence, ranging from a proposed anti-citizenship law, which could deprive many of them of their citizenship and voting rights, to lynching for alleged slaughter of cows. Now, following the BJP’s re-election in UP, the Muslims have grown more fearful.
Indeed, if a promise was made to redistribute assets owned by Muslims to the lower castes, will there be a rise in violence against Muslims?
Alarmed by the public calls for genocide against Muslims, more than 200 retired senior armed forces officers asked Modi and other officials to take punitive action against the monks and other speakers. So far there has been no action taken.
Retired Admiral Arun Prakash, a Hindu who was head of the Indian Navy, tweeted, “WHY IS THIS NOT BEING STOPPED? With our Jawans (soldiers) facing enemies on 2 fronts (China and Pakistan), do we want a communal blood-bath, domestic turmoil and international disgrace? Is it difficult to understand that anything which damages national cohesion & unity endangers India’s national security?”
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