Who stands to gain from UP's high voter turnout? Akhilesh or Modi?
Is the all-time high voter turnout of about 65 per cent in the first phase of the seven-phased Uttar Pradesh Assembly election good news for the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) or its sworn rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)?
That was the question being hotly debated in UP’s political circles, which do not anymore see the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as among the key contenders in the battle of the ballot that will determine the political destiny of the country’s most populous state.
Reports reaching here from the 73 Assembly constituencies, spread across 15 districts, suggest a higher than usual turnout of Muslim voters. And to that extent, it sounds like a good signal for the SP-Congress alliance which was, anyway, hoping to attract the bulk of the Muslim vote.
And surely, that is not good news for the BJP, which was relying heavily on a split in the Muslim vote between SP and BSP.
BSP supremo Mayawati had been making fervent appeals to Muslims to not vote for the SP. But political observers in several parts of western UP where polling was held on Saturday felt that those appeals were likely to remain counter-productive.
“By repeatedly crying her lungs out to dissuade people from voting for CM Akhilesh Yadav, the BSP chief only ended up putting off Muslims,” claimed a Meerut University professor who does not wish to be named. “Oft repeated recent utterances of Mayawati made her come out as shaky, which led many to believe that she had already accepted defeat; therefore it was most unlikely that Muslims would gravitate towards her party,” he sought to point out.
The BSP had done pretty well in 2012 when it bagged 23 of the 73 seats that went to the polls in this phase. The only way it could have gained this time was by denting the SP, which had a score of 24 last time, when BJP stood at just 11 seats.
However, what was likely to have played out in favour of SP was its last minute decision to join hands with the Congress. It was the alliance that earned greater credibility as the only potent force with the capability to take on the BJP.
What apparently seems to have also proved counter-productive for Mayawati were appeals issued by two prominent maulanas to vote for the BSP. Delhi Jama Masjid’s Shahi Imam Ahmed Bukhari, who was the first to issue an appeal for Mayawati , had already lost credibility when he began to blatantly seek political favours for his own son-in-law from erstwhile SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav over the past five years.
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| Mayawati had done pretty well in 2012 when her party bagged 23 of 73 seats in this phase. (Photo: India Today) |
Initially, he bargained for a ticket in 2012. After losing the election, Bukhari managed to get him an SP nomination in the state’s upper house of legislature, following which he grabbed a ministerial berth.
Mulayam went about obliging him until a high court order stripped many like him of “minister’s rank”. And Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawaad, who had also issued a similar appeal, represented only a fraction of the already small Shia community.
Mayawati’s bid to woo Muslims was earlier demonstrated in her decision to field a large number of Muslim candidates.
The Akhilesh-Rahul Gandhi duo, which has been displaying excellent chemistry, has also done its bit to reinforce confidence among the minority community. However, their attempts to woo Muslims were relatively more subtle.
On the other hand, BJP’s entire campaign turned into one or the other appeal in the name of Hindutva. Even as PM Narendra Modi shunned even a remote play of the communal card or a mention of “Hindus and Muslims”, the lumpen element in the party, including the likes of saffron clad Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj, left no stone unturned to whip up religious passions.
The attempt by several BJP leaders to play the communal card in the name of “exodus of Hindus” from Kairana got watered down by none other than BJP’s own local MP Hukum Singh, who made it a point to declare that the issue was far from “communal”.
Singh told mediapersons very explicitly “that is not a Hindu-Muslim issue; the well-to-do were running away from Kairana because of being hounded by criminals”.
Interestingly, it was Hukum Singh who was the first to raise the Kairana issue in 2016, but no sooner than the media exposed the fallacy behind the charge, this BJP MP himself backtracked. Yet, BJP president Amit Shah did not hesitate to make an issue out of it in his election manifesto.
Rival political leaders may be making claims and counter-claims about their party getting the edge in what was seen as the first innings of the election, but until the verdict of the people comes out of the sealed electronic voting machines on March 11, they are free to draw their own conclusions.