Uttar Pradesh | Shutting the revolving door

On February 22, all the talk in Lucknow was about how ‘UP ke do ladke’ (the two boys from Uttar Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav) had come together again, sealing the alliance for the Congress and Samajwadi Party in the coming Lok Sabha election. The celebrations were short-lived, though, as a reality check presented itself on February 27 with the Rajya Sabha election. Even as voting was under way, five SP legislators, including the party’s chief whip Manoj Kumar Pandey, went to meet Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. By evening, it was clear that seven party MLAs had cross-voted (one more abstained), dashing the SP’s chances on what was a sure third seat from the state.

The RS poll was no sidelight intruding upon the main event: it had been one of the key considerations in the formation of the alliance in UP. Altogether, 10 seats were at stake, with 37 votes needed to win a seat. The BJP had nominated Sanjay Seth as its eighth candidate at the eleventh hour to spite the SP, who had already declared Jaya Bachchan, Ramji Lal Suman and former chief secretary Alok Ranjan as its candidates. The SP needed 111 votes to win all three seats but had only 108 of its own. So, the two votes from the Congress and one vote from Pallavi Patel (Apna Dal Kamerawadi leader) were crucial. In the end, it didn’t matter as the SP’s own MLAs did it in, and Ranjan lost.

The alliance will now have to quickly regroup after the RS disappo­intment. According to the agreement, the Congress has been allotted 17 seats in UP, while in Madhya Pradesh, the SP will contest the Khajuraho seat and support the Grand Old Party in the remaining 28 in the state. In UP, the big seats the Congress will be contesting are Rae Bareli, Amethi, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Mathura.

Sources say fear of a split in the minority votes (almost 19 per cent of the population) was also a big factor in the coming together of both parties. The SP was vulnerable because the general consensus is that the Muslim community has come to repose faith in the Congress nationally. Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra also got a very good response in the Muslim-dominated areas in UP, which increased the pressure on the SP.

In the past month, questions had been being raised about whether the I.N.D.I.A. bloc will hold. After the MP assembly election debacle, words were exchanged between the SP and the Congress, with allegations that the latter was trying to expand the space for Rahul at the cost of its allies. To assuage such fears, the Congress national leadership apparently impressed on its state unit to settle for 17 seats (they had been adam­ant on another five—Lakhimpur Kheri , Shravasti, Ballia, Bijnor and Moradabad). The party’s UP in-charge Avinash Pandey told india today that some negotiations could happen later but, as of now, “we have agreed to the SP’s offer”. Sources in the Congress hinted that it may request SP to exchange Shravasti and Lakhimpur with Mathura and Bulandshahr.

The SP has lost two of its main allies—the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP)—since its decent show in the 2022 UP assembly poll, when it raised its tally from 47 to 111 seats. As for the Congress, it has seen a steady erosion in support in the past few elections. In the 2019 LS poll, it managed just one seat, Rae Bareli, where Sonia Gandhi won. Rahul had lost in family pocket borough Amethi (to the BJP’s Smriti Irani) despite the SP and BSP not fielding a candidate there.

Indeed, a turnaround for the Congress seems a monumental task. In 2019, the BJP had won 14 of the 17 seats that have come to the Congress now, 11 of them with over 50 per cent vote share. The latter, on the other hand, could not manage even 10 per cent of the vote in nine of these 17 seats. Beyond the math, the Congress-SP alliance needs to be in sync, not just to ensure transfer of votes but also to attract new voters. Sources in the Congress say several senior leaders, including Salman Khurshid, Rajesh Mishra and Brijlal Khabri, are unhappy as seats in their fief have gone to the SP.

Another challenge is communal polarisation. In the past few years, whenever two Opposition parties have got together in UP, the BJP has been able to project it as an ‘unholy alliance’ to consolidate the Muslim vote. The SP-Congress must neutra­lise this narrative while also relaying a message of uniting the PDAs (Pichada, Dalit and Alpsankhyak)or Backwards, Dalits and minorities (especially Muslims). It’s an uphill task and the two parties will not want to dwell on their last disastrous outing together—the 2017 debacle that installed Yogi in Lucknow.

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