Muslim vote will go for candidates best placed to beat Modi

NEW DELHI: A large current account deficit, foreign exchange for only a few months of imports and Ayodhya hogging the headlines… the 1990s seem to have made a comeback.

Not so, as far as Uttar Pradesh politics is concerned. On the face of it, the raking up of the Ayodhya issue, with a hardline Hindutva icon like Narendra Modi at the helm of affairs, is expected to reap electoral dividends for BJP and even the Samajwadi Party. However, the state of affairs is not as cut and dried as it was two decades ago.

Apart from the most obvious demographic changes affecting the political landscape (nearly 60% of the electorate is below 35), the broad contours of support bases of various parties have shown a remarkable change.

According to Dr Sanjay Kumar, fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and author of several books, looking at voting patterns in various states, the ‘X factor’ that BJP and SP have not taken into account, in their competitive bid to communally polarise the polity, is the Bahujan Samaj Party.

“BSP was not the major force in the 1990s, it was a direct competition for the communally-polarised voter between BJP and Mulayam Singh Yadav. Much water has flown in the Sarayu since. BSP has experimented and drawn other communities to its fold like upper castes, Brahmins in particular, and have become a major player for even the Muslim vote,” he said.

The vulnerability of SP’s calculations are very evident from the data comparing the way different communities voted in the 2009 Lok Sabha election in UP and the 2012 assembly polls. In 2009, SP made several mistakes to alienating Muslims by expelling Azam Khan and tying up with Kalyan Singh of Babri Masjid demolition fame. In that election, according to data disaggregated by CSDS, SP cornered 30% of minority votes, while BSP won 18%, and Congress made a surprisingly strong showing with 24%.




In the 2012 assembly election, SP won an unprecedented majority and had a better showing among Muslims (Azam Khan had returned, Kalyan Singh discarded), securing 43% of minority votes, most gains at Congress’ expense, which polled only 17% of Muslim votes. But notably, BSP, despite losing power, managed to increase its Muslim vote share to 20%.

Therefore, BSP continues to be a robust competitor with SP for the Muslim vote in the 2014 election. Also, Congress being the main player for formation of a non-Saffron coalition government at the Centre could do better than 2012. SP managed to beat BSP in 2012 because it surprisingly managed to attract part of Mayawati’s voters among Jatavs, non-Jatav Dalits, Kurmis, Koeris, lower OBCs and BJP’s upper caste Rajput and Brahmin voters.

The same communities may not coalesce into a vote bank for SP in the 2014 elections. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s troubles with Raja Bhaiyya could mean shift of Rajput vote away from SP and the return of Jatav and non-Jatav Dalits to Mayawati. BJP is expected to gain much of the upper caste vote. “The Muslim vote will not go en bloc to either SP or Congress. It will go for candidates and parties best placed to beat Narendra Modi’s BJP,” says Kumar based on his data. It is Modi, not mandir which would determine polarisation.

BJP and SP, however, seem determined to follow the 1990s script to a T, hoping that a remake would be as successful as the original production. In Parliament on Monday, senior BJP MP Yogi Adityanath demanded the dismissal of the UP government after it clamped down on the ‘84 Kosi Parikrama’ organised by VHP, while Mulayam Singh Yadav called the government’s actions as ‘constitutional duty’.

UP will be won on the basis of the ‘M factor’ of the Mulsim vote – Modi, Mulayam and Mayawati, but certainly not Mandir.