Caste calculation down to the last percentage point determines election outcomes in most of India, and it’s no news in Uttar Pradesh either. What is new, however, is the sudden scramble for the Kurmi vote. At the heart of this is an attempt to consolidate the non-Yadav vote for the 2017 Assembly polls. Parties, with BJP on one side and a range of rival claimants on the other, are making a play for it. Even the Congress is trying to get back into the game, with the newly-minted JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar forming an interesting addition to the jigsaw.
Nitish has not only lent his management-style poll strategist Prashant Kishor to Congress, he seems to be lending a hand to the party by replicating his OBC-EBC model for the aid of the grand old party. By most reckonings, Kurmis are anywhere between 4-5 per cent and 5-6 per cent of the Uttar Pradesh population (in the ’90s, estimates went up to 9 per cent), and almost a quarter of the state’s OBC population.
This caste’s vote becomes crucial because, like the 11 per cent Brahmin vote, it is spread throughout the state, with concentrations in the eastern Poorvanchal belt, and in Kanpur and Bundelkhand, bordering Madhya Pradesh. They are a dominant, prosperous OBC caste (like the Yadavs) and can also have a swing effect by influencing opinions.
Since the Mandal era, BJP has always been wooing the non-Yadav OBC cluster, which includes the Kushwahas, Lodhs (Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati’s caste), Baghels, Nishads, Rajbhars and others. This cluster forms 11-12 per cent of the total vote of Uttar Pradesh, a great potential in addition to its natural Savarna votes.
This time, BJP made the first move by pitchforking Anupriya Patel of the Kurmi party Apna Dal to the Union Cabinet. It also has given prominence to the caste cluster by making Keshav Prasad Maurya, a former gau rakshak (cow protector), president of the state unit (though Maurya has none of the brand worth of former CM from the same caste cluster, Kalyan Singh).
Action was also sparked off by the rebellion of Mayawati’s Kurmi face Swami Prasad Maurya, though he has dallied with BJP, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and now Congress, with Nitish-Kishor also pitching in to get him to that side with a new party. He’s a sign of the premium on the non-Yadav OBC vote (Mauryas form a 1-2 per cent vote bloc, a sign of how fragmented the electoral map is).
This is not the first time Nitish is foraying into Uttar Pradesh. In three-four elections, he has unsuccessfully contested in alliance with BJP. This time he’s firmly on the anti-BJP side, trying to be a catalyst of sorts. His alliance partner in Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, is staying entirely aloof though, not wanting to be part of any messy coalition in his Yadav in-law Mulayam Singh’s home turf.
There is no open JD(U)-Congress alliance, but Nitish and Kishor seem to be working in tandem. Says a close confidant of the Bihar CM that he will not want Kishor to fail in his Uttar Pradesh gambit. It’s also about preparatory moves for 2019. Nitish also shared the stage in Lucknow with BSP rebel R K Chaudhary, a Passi leader part of Nitish’s OBC-EBC consolidation.
Almost replicating BJP’s pre-2014 strategy, both Congress (egged on by Kishor) and Nitish have opened channels with Krishna Patel, the mother of Anupriya, who heads a rival faction of Apna Dal (which broke early this year, when the mother tried to prop up elder daughter Pallavi). For BJP, this fracture can be potentially tricky.
Anupriya as a young, literate face of the Kurmis from eastern Uttar Pradesh has a lot of potential, but Krishna controls the bigger chunk of workers of the party founded by her husband, the late Sonelal Patel.
Sonelal had started his caste assertion politics originally in tandem with Kanshi Ram and was one of the founder-members of BSP. This partly explains the old BSP sway over this non-Dalit group, which Maurya’s rebellion has left it bereft of now.
In 1995, Sonelal spun off to found Apna Dal to project the political needs of the Kurmis, who bear a distant kinship to the agitating Patels of Gujarat. From the beginning, Kurmi assertion was set against the Yadav domination of the OBC space. He was never very successful in his project, but his politics is bearing fruit now.
Krishna may not win too many seats, but she can pull some votes across constituencies and act as a spoiler, which ties in neatly with the Congress plan, which is to deny BJP exclusive access to this space. If not a Mayawati win, with tacit Congress backing, it would not even mind a return of Akhilesh Yadav. In the best case scenario for Congress, it would have a role in government formation. Except for Mulayam’s vote and BSP’s Jatav bloc within the Dalits, both solid, everything else is fair game. Now, as these chess-games play out six months prior to the polls, the grand moves are being played around Nitish and Anupriya as the prominent competing faces in the buzzing Kurmi space.