Can Uttar Pradesh remain a BJP stronghold?

It was the first week of April 2021 when the second wave of Covid-19 started taking an ominous turn. He got an oxygen bed at the Banaras Hindu University Hospital (BHU) in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi. But it all went downhill soon after.

Swati’s health deteriorated rapidly as the caseload in the hospital increased. Rohit says, “She had an oxygen mask on and therefore could not speak. She would write in her diary, asking doctors to take care of her. We could feel the panic in her writing. On the fifth day, she started Did ‘Sita-Ram’, write ‘Sita-Ram’.

The sloganeering didn’t work. Swati died on 10 April 2021, about a week after being admitted to the hospital. She was 28 years old.

When the hospital returned Swati’s belongings to the family, her diary was missing. “We told them we would not take the dead body until we got the diary back,” says Rohit. He was probably afraid that the diary would expose the chaos inside the hospital. This unpleasant dispute went on for some time. Eventually the hospital agreed and returned his diary. “But the pages she was writing on in the hospital were clearly torn,” says Rohit.

Rohit, a Brahmin, is a farmer based in Narayanpur village—about 30 kilometers from Varanasi. His painful experience is not even a year old, even as the state of Uttar Pradesh goes to polls in seven phases, the results of which will be out on March 10. He personally witnessed and deeply suffered the consequences of inadequate health infrastructure and lack of further planning by the state government.

Still, he believes that the state government led by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath deserves a second term. Rohit says, “It is not that nothing has happened in the last five years. In our village, the electricity supply is much more regular. Earlier, we used to get electricity during the day or at night. The roads have become better.” We used to live in Varanasi city till about three years back. But after regularization of electricity and improvement in infrastructure, we went back to the village.”

When the second wave ravaged the countryside, it did not spare a single state in India. However, photos from Uttar Pradesh – of mass graves and bodies floating in water – were particularly terrifying, suggesting that the state had overestimated Covid deaths than any other state. Many thought it would be the downfall of the current government. However, many Hindu voters continue to believe in the ruling party, despite facing or seeing many tragedies as reasons why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been difficult to remove in Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) are the two main challenges for the BJP. Mayawati, who became chief minister in 2007, has seen a steady decline in her vote share since then. Hence observers believe that it is largely a bipolar contest between the BJP and the SP. In 2017, the BJP won 312 out of 403 constituencies with an overwhelming majority. The state rose to prominence by mobilizing non-Yadav OBC votes and non-Jatav Dalit votes – over the Hindu upper caste. Build your main vote bank. For Akhilesh to make a comeback, he will have to break into this constituency, which will create his incremental vote over Muslims and Yadavs.

‘Law and order reform’

In the opposite corner of Uttar Pradesh, about 800 kilometers from Varanasi, a person requesting anonymity tells WebMD that mismanagement, rising inflation, or unemployment won’t make much difference during Covid. “We get more expectations from leaders who come from our caste,” he says, even though that leader is making our lives miserable.

The man lost his brother to Covid-19 in April 2021. He was a teacher. The state government had decided to hold panchayat elections amid a furious second wave and teachers were being asked to attend schools. “He had also given training to the teachers who would conduct the elections,” he says.

His brother, who taught in a primary school in western Uttar Pradesh, was one of them. He was infected during one of those days, and soon died of breathlessness. “I was very close to my brother,” he says. “He is survived by his wife and two young children. I don’t earn much. I wonder how we’ll get back on our feet. But I don’t think it will have much effect on our turnout.”

He is Thakur. The community has traditionally voted for the BJP, with Rajnath Singh being a prominent Thakur leader in the past. At present, his Thakur face is the Chief Minister himself. “If I vote for someone else because this government did not provide jobs or oxygen, that vote will not be valid,” he says.

I ask him to elaborate. “Does an MLA from another party believe that I voted for him if I said so?” he asks. “My community mostly votes for the BJP. Everyone knows this. So, we make excuses to vote for the person who represents our community.”

“The state government could have done better during Covid,” he says. “But at least Adityanath does not have a corruption case against himself. Even if Akhilesh Yadav had been the chief minister, the state would have suffered equally during the pandemic.”

Adesh Singh, in his 40s, in Partapur village of Dhaulana block of Hapur district, says the state lacked resources, leading to chaos during Covid. They lost three elderly members of their joint family during the second wave. They could not find oxygen beds in their district or nearby areas. “We made calls, kept running one by one. It didn’t matter,” he says. “But with limited resources in the state, there’s only so much you can do.”

Adesh, who is also a Thakur, says that Uttar Pradesh was not the only state that suffered losses. “Even in developed countries, large numbers of people were dying,” he adds. “Compared to that, Uttar Pradesh handled it quite well.”

Adesh is a finance professional who works in Noida, 50 kms away. He says that the condition of the highway has improved a lot in the last five years. “I get to the office in less than an hour,” he says. “The law and order situation in the state has also improved. The police work more freely, and are more receptive to people’s grievances. This was not the case under the previous government.”

are among the most common lines heard on the ground but workers are different. Ever since Adityanath took over the state of Uttar Pradesh, he claims that the law and order machinery has become an extension of radical right-wing organisations. Muslim vendors and cattle traders have been attacked. Fake encounters and human rights violations have been reported during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

‘New Welfare’

60-year-old Savitri Verma, who belongs to the Sonar community among Other Backward Classes (OBC), sits on a cot outside her hut in Jalalabad village of Ghazipur. She declares that she is an admirer of Adityanath because of his Hindutva politics. “BJP built the Ram temple,” she says. “It didn’t happen under any other government. We waited for this for so many years. No other party takes care of Hindus like BJP. If Adityanath loses, it’s difficult to find such a chief minister.”

The rise of Adityanath has marginalized Muslims in the state like never before. Ghaziabad-based Ola driver Mohammad Imran says that passengers have canceled the ride only after seeing his name. “In the first few months after the outbreak of Covid-19, Muslims were treated like superspreaders,” he says. “The media and many right-wing organizations here defame us after the Tablighi Jamaat incident. We have been removed as second class citizens.” (In March 2020, Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary movement, organized a congregation in Delhi despite restrictions on public gatherings. More than 4,000 Covid cases were later linked to the gathering.)

The rise of the BJP in the state is a mixture of nationalism, Hindutva, propaganda and welfare politics. Reversing progress made in education, health care and nutrition, people’s access to clean cooking fuel, sanitation and drinking water has increased significantly since 2014, according to recent findings from the National Family Health Survey. Calling it the “new welfare”, former chief economic adviser to the government Arvind Subramaniam wrote that the center’s focus is on delivering tangible goods over intangible ones.

It has definitely won Channar Ram’s vote.

Ram, a 70-year-old Dalit man from Jalalabad, lost everything after the lockdown. He used to go from house to house, colony to colony, cleaning people’s belongings or working as a labourer. “With the lockdown, it came to a complete halt,” he says. “Since two years, I have almost zero income. My children also work as laborers. But they cannot take care of their families properly. How will they take care of me?”

Amazingly, Ram does not blame the state for the lack of employment for himself and his children. But he is grateful to the state for “helping him survive” during this period. “We got free ration from the government during these difficult times,” he says. “This government has also doubled the pension of senior citizens” from 500 1,000 per month.”

‘Give us work’

However formidable the BJP looks on the ground, it is important to note that the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh has not got a second chance for many years. In 2022, that change could be brought about by two quarters: disgruntled farmers and unemployed youth. It protested for a year and accused the central government of killing 700 people for repealing three agricultural laws introduced in September 2020.

The agricultural bill—sought to reset the way agricultural produce was traded within India—would have given farmers the freedom to sell their produce to any buyer outside state-regulated wholesale markets.

A large section of the protesting farmers were from western Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP did very well in the 2017 assembly elections.

Vaibhav Verma, 27, a farmer from Bulandshahr and a member of the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh—one of the organizations at the forefront of the protest—say the BJP will pay a heavy price for how it treated farmers for a year. “If they think they can get our votes by repealing agricultural laws, they are wrong,” he says. “We all have supported the BJP in the past. But we cannot go after this dictatorship. This government has not even created any jobs.”

In March 2017, when Adityanath took over as chief minister, the state’s unemployment rate was 2.4%, according to CMIE. In December 2021, it doubled to 4.9%. The data is visible on the ground.

Every morning, battling the harsh winter, workers in and around Bulandshahr gather at the exhibition grounds in the hope of getting a day’s work. Most of the times they go home disappointed. “I spent 25 to come here every day,” says Deepak Kumar, a 25-year-old laborer from nearby Baral village. “I think if I had sat at home, I would have saved at least 25. Because there is no work.”

As someone walks into the exhibition grounds to hire laborers, a bunch of them gather around, hoping that their faces will be noticed. Deepak says, “It means employers exploit us. They know we have no work. So, they pay 300 for a job that would normally get us 800.”

Deepak, who studied computer science for two years before leaving school due to financial reasons, says that the state government has not done anything to help the unemployed. “They are taking us for a walk,” he says.