UP polls: 1st phase crucial for Mulayam

If there is one phase of the Uttar Pradesh elections that is crucial to Mulayam Singh's bid to bring his Samajwadi Party back to power in the state, it is this first phase.

Not only does this phase include the SP supremo's home turf of Etawah district, this region that includes parts of central UP and the south-western districts was the one that gave him a decisive edge in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004.

In the 2002 assembly polls, the SP had won just 24 of the 62 seats in this phase. Two years later, it led in 45 of them. That was a remarkable performance for more than one reason. For starters, the SP had actually lost ground in the rest of the state - leading in 115 assembly segments compared to the 119 it won in 2002. It more than made up for those reversals in this part of the state.

Secondly, in 2002 Kalyan Singh had quit the BJP and formed his own Rashtriya Kranti Party which played a major spoiler, garnering 7.2 per cent of the votes in these 62 seats, winning just one of them but doing enough to ruin the BJP's prospects in many more.

In fact, there were 12 seats in which the combined tally of the BJP and the RKP would have been more than enough to win. With Kalyan Singh back in the fold by the 2004 elections, it is the BJP, therefore, which should really have gained. The fact that it did not and the SP did is thus quite remarkable.

The problem for Mulayam would be that the 2004 performance may just be too good to repeat. He also has a factor to take into account, not knowing just how much of an impact it will have. That is the exit of Raj Babbar, who was the SP's sitting MP from Agra, to join V P Singh's Jan Morcha.

With the morcha roping in sundry Muslim organizations, Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party and the CPI, the moot question is just how much they could damage the SP's prospects in this part of the state.

The Muslim factor will not be a major one in this first phase because Muslims form a relatively small proportion of the total population in most of the districts in this phase. In most cases, it is below 10%, which is way below the state average of 18.5%. To that extent, even the potential impact of Thursday's High Court order that the community should not be treated as a minority-stayed later- may be minimal here.

This is also a phase in which the smaller players in UP politics - Ajit Singh's RLD, the Apna Dal, Beni Prasad Verma's new party or the Hindu Mahasabha, for instance - have little or no role to play, though the RLD might have a marginal presence in some seats, thanks to the area's proximity to the Jat heartland of western Uttar Pradesh.

On the whole, therefore, this phase is one in which there will be little to gain but a lot that could be lost for the SP, whereas for the other major parties - the BSP and BJP in particular, they really can't do very much worse than they did three years ago, and the potential upside is huge.