Their coming together was akin to a pact between Palestine and Israel, or a joint venture between Toyota and Vokswagen—so much rancour SP and BSP had bred between themselves. But this improbable phenomenon happened on January 12. The goal—to stop the saffron juggernaut, led by PM Narendra Modi.
Bubbling with enthusiasm, while SP and BSP workers staged a grand show of solidarity during the announcement of alliance, BSP chief Mayawati chose the occasion to emphasise that she had risen above the memories of infamous Guest House Episode of June 1995 in the ‘interest of the nation’ to defeat ‘casteist and communal forces’.
SP and BSP share 37 and 38 seats respectively, leaving three for junior ally Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and giving a free run to the Congress high command in Amethi and Rae Bareli. The decision to leave Amethi and Rae Bareli for Rahul and Sonia had nothing to do with sentiments of ‘secular’ solidarity as claimed by Mayawati but it was driven by a hard-nosed political consideration that BJP didn’t get chance to keep them ‘engaged’ in their respective constituencies.
The distribution of seats, however, matches each party’s broad support base. While the SP gets more seats in the central Doab region, its traditional stronghold, BSP has an upper hand in western and north-eastern UP. The RLD has got three seats—Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat and Mathura, all dominated by Jats. Of 17 reserved seats, BSP will contest in 10 and the rest seven have gone to SP.
The sheer arithmetic of UP shows that if the votes secured by SP and BSP in 2014 Lok Sabha polls and Assembly elections of 2017 are factored in, the alliance could pose a formidable challenge to the BJP. In 2014, BJP had scored 42.30 percent votes, while SP and BSP together secured 41.80 percent, just 0.5 percent less than the BJP. In the Assembly elections of 2017, their combined vote tally was a good 5.75 percentage points ahead of the BJP. But had they contested jointly in 2014, BJP would have reduced to 23 seats and Congress could have won just four.
However, an alliance without the Congress will lose some of its firepower on ground. After Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s plunge, not only the poll analysts and Congressmen, even the alliance think-tank went back to drawing board to rework the maths. “On the face of it, the caste calculation and poll statistics may seem tilting the balance in favour of SP-BSP alliance, but victories and defeats are much beyond simple arithmetic. It is more about the chemistry among the voters on the ground,” says JP Shukla, a political observer.
Significantly, both the parties have traditionally been arch-rivals, with Yadavs and Dalits always at logger heads at the local level. Consequently, the bigger challenge for both Akhilesh and Mayawati is to persuade their local leaders to sink differences and work for the alliance’s victory. “If one goes by the NCRB data, majority of the cases under the SC/ST Act have been lodged against Yadavs,” says a prominent Dalit ideologue. He doubts the success of the alliance to the expected extent as he believes that at the ground, the divide is too wide.
Past trends indicate that Mayawati is more capable of getting BSP votes transferred to allies than Akhilesh. SP-Congress alliance was caught in the quandary of this equation in 2017 UP polls as both the parties had failed to transfer their respective votes to alliance candidates. Mayawati, however, sounds confident that SP and BSP would transfer their votes cent percent to each other as was evident in 1993 and also UP bypolls in 2018, but political observers have their doubts. “This could be her view but in bypolls, the BSP had no direct stakes involved. It was a quiet partner. Now the BSP’s political stakes are high in the fight for Delhi,” says SK Diwedi, a social scientist.
Akhilesh faces challenges on several fronts. He has to convince his party’s voters more because of the hostile patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav who has publicly disapproved the alliance with BSP. Besides, rumblings within the SP’s first family, the rebellion of Shivpal Yadav with his own party and a resolve to dent SP prospects barring Mulayam and the disenchantment of party veterans with the new leadership have left SP cadres in discomfort.
“Netaji (Mulayam) still has a say among dedicated SP voters. His displeasure over the alliance and impression that Akhilesh has compromised party interests can drift the voters to other parties like the BJP or Shivpal Yadav,” says a veteran SP leader.
Although the alliance is the natural choice for Muslims, the resurgence of the Congress may have some adverse impact here. However, the gathbandhan has chalked out an elaborate campaign plan comprising a dozen joint rallies by Mayawati, Akhilesh and Ajit Singh of RLD across the state. The first joint rally will be held at Deoband in Saharanpur on April 7, a day after the commencement of Chaitra Navratra in a massive show of strength. The most watched-out joint rally of the alliance will be on April 19, when Mayawati will be seen seeking votes for arch rival Mulayam who is likely to be present on the dais.
The grand alliance has made the contest open and competitive in UP. It seems more of a battle between Brand Modi and caste arithmetic of the alliance with the Congress at the third corner.