New Delhi: The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections has not surprised many, but the rise of Akhilesh Yadav and his Samajwadi Party (SP) 2.0 must have given the jitters to many, including the BJP.
Despite several important issues such as rising inflation, unemployment, the plight of farmers, which were aggressively raised by Akhilesh Yadav in his political rallies, the defeat of SP tells the story of BJP's mastery in social engineering as SP's all efforts to push its vote share above 40 per cent has not worked well.
The performance of SP in the 2022 Assembly elections is much better than its performance in 2017, when the party had forged pre-poll alliance with Congress. In 2017 elections, the SP had got just 22 per cent votes, while its ally Congress had managed to get 6.25 per cent votes – in total the SP-Congress alliance had got 28 per cent votes. The SP had won 47 seats and its ally Congress had managed to get just seven seats.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which had fought the battle of ballots alone, fetched over 22 per cent of votes and had won 19 seats.
After the 2019 fallout, when SP, BSP, and RLD had forged an 'unbeatable alliance' on the paper for the Lok Sabha elections, Akhilesh attempted to broaden his horizon by bringing Jat leader Jayant Chaudhary-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) to its side again. The objective of this alliance was to touch upon 40 per cent vote share mark in 2022 Assembly elections, which didn't work in toto as Jat votes transferred to BJP again.
In contrary to 2017 Assembly election results, SP has won 111 seats alone by securing 32 per cent vote share, while its ally RLD has won eight seats by fetching 3 per cent vote share. The SP and RLD alliance has got 35 per cent of total vote share, which is above 6 per cent lesser than the total vote share of BJP's 41.4 per cent.
The best part for SP is that the vote share gap of the BJP and SP-RLD alliance has come down to just 7 per cent, which may not have gone well with the BJP's poll managers. As per 2019 polling pattern, the alliance had the challenge of swinging more than 16 per cent to beat BJP, which has been significantly brought down. The alliance would now have to score above 4 per cent in the next election to compete with the BJP, which appears a little possible.
Notably, the UP's voters were largely divided between the three big parties - SP, BSP and BJP between 2002 and 2014. The Lok Sabha elections in 2014 proved a gamechanger for BJP when the party fetched above 40 per cent votes under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Then PM Modi won the state for his party in 2017 by maintaining the party's vote-share.
With Akhilesh giving a tough fight to the Modi-BJP, it is not going to be a easy for SP chief as UP will have to be ready for daily political battles over the next two years.
The next challenge for Akhilesh would be to keep his core voters – Yadav and Muslims -- intact as the ruling party would now redouble its efforts to deliver benefits to non-Yadav OBCs to win them back. The ruling party would also make more organised efforts to break the network of Yadav and Muslim strongmen without whom the SP's alliance would not be able to function on the ground