Election Results: Job promises, caste card and culling of ‘idle’ leaders boosted saffron in UP

LUCKNOW/NEW DELHI: His inner tensions getting the better of him, BJP leader Amit Shah broke an unspoken rule when he broached business ahead of dinner.

“Tauji, meri izzat to barkarar rahegi? (I hope my honour will remain intact)” the BJP pointman for Uttar Pradesh asked a circle of Jat elders who sat around an evening fire.

The breach of etiquette was met with a gentle rap on the wrist. “First we will eat. Uske baad hukka hoga ,” Shah was informed by his hosts.

Later, as conversation turned to business, the Jat conclave in a village in western UP provided Shah the answer to his query. “Tu Modi ko le aa. Uske baad vote mangne bhi na aana (Bring Modi, after that don’t even come to ask for votes),” they told him.

As results of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats tumbled in, the saffron sweep that began with polling in western UP on April 10 continued almost without a break.
The margins told the story . BJP’s Agra nominee won by 3 lakh votes. RLD chief Ajit Singh lost the second Lok Sabha election of his career to former Mumbai top cop Satyapal Singh by over 2 lakh votes.

Congress' Dalit leader PL Punia was worsted by more than 2 lakh votes, BJP’s Uma Bharti won Jhansi by 1.9 lakh votes and coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal lost to BJP veteran M M Joshi by more than 2 lakh votes.

In the end, BSP’s inability to win a single seat despite 19.6 per cent of the vote seems a somewhat cruel fate since SP won five with 22.2 per cent. But BSP’s decline from 27 per cent in 2009 is only part of the story.

It is BJP’s rise from 17 per cent — barely enough to save deposits — to 42 per cent in 2014 that reveals the tectonic shift in UP’s political landscape.

BSP has taken the worst hit as it lost a slice of its Dalit base, possibly from non-Jatav communities though some of her own castemen might have fled the fold, while the Muslim vote failed to consolidate.

Akbarpur, a constituency that BSP chief Mayawati once held, returned the BJP nominee by 2.7 lakh votes. Apna Dal leader Anupriya Patel won by more than 2 lakh votes from Mirzapur, as BJP’s pact with the Kurmi outfit clicked.
SP boss Mulayam Singh Yadav won his ''second constituency'' of Azamgarh by a little over 60,000 votes, much less than a margin of a lakh that a leader of his stature can expect. In fact, the fact that SP’s five seats have all gone to the Mulayam clan is revealing.

What changed this time around was that Modi’s campaign and Shah’s organizational skills turned BJP from a moribund outfit of unfit has-beens into a fighting unit that came to believe in itself.

This happened as a result of some radical surgery as senior leaders, who rarely moved out of the comfort of their Lucknow homes, were sidelined and a new set of district level workers given specific tasks.