Who will benefit from community and caste divide, BJP or Congress?

UTTAR PRADESH

Described in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India as the heart of Hindustan, Uttar Pradesh continues to remain politically the most crucial part of the Hindi heartland. The BJP swept the state with 71 of 80 seats in 2014 (73 for its National Democratic Alliance) and 62 (64 for the NDA) in 2019. Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the alliance would win all 80 seats this time.

Except in Uttar Pradesh, the NDA has hit the saturation point in the heartland. It has all 25 seats in Rajasthan, 28 of 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh, all five seats in Uttarakhand, 39 of 40 seats in Bihar, all 10 seats in Haryana, 12 of 14 seats in Jharkhand and nine of 11 seats in Chhattisgarh. No wonder, the BJP eyes Uttar Pradesh to improve its tally in the region.

More than anything else, the saffron brigade’s advantage is the inherent weakness of the opposition. With the Bahujan Samaj Party widely seen as “surrendered” before threats from the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI, the Samajwadi Party remains the key opposition in Uttar Pradesh. The increasingly weakened position of the Congress is clear from the fact that the party is contesting from just 17 seats.

As the BJP plays up the Ram Temple card, the communal divide is quite evident in large parts of the state. But there is as much of a caste divide, which could upset the BJP applecart. “What has the government done for my community, except for giving free rations, to which everyone is entitled?” asked Radhey Lal, a dalit who had served as the village head in Dawoodnagar in Lucknow. Another dalit villager, Raja Ram, from Karora village a few kilometres away, said, “Whoever wins power will ensure the disbursement of free rations to us.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi often reminds his audience about the welfare measures introduced by him, such as the annual grant of Rs2,000 to every farmer, electricity connection to every home and gas cylinder under the Ujjwala scheme. But not everyone is impressed.

“Refilling gas cylinders costs so much and the subsidy often does not reach everyone,” said Radhey Lal. Even the free-ration scheme is not without problems. “Invariably, the shop-owner eats into the entitlement and makes a quick buck, which must obviously be shared with officials concerned,” said Chotey Lal, a construction worker from Lucknow.

Similar reactions were heard from eastern Uttar Pradesh, too. In Basti, 200km from Lucknow, Jagram Chaudhary, a member of the Other Backward Classes (OBC), said he was not obligated to vote for the BJP simply because the party built the Ram Temple. “The temple is there because of the court order. But these people are trying to take all credit only to get our votes,” said the 50-year-old, who works as a peon.

Travelling across Uttar Pradesh, one notices that it is mostly the urban voters who are more influenced by the Ram Temple. Most of them are clearly smitten by Modi, and they cite the achievements of the ruling dispensation in exactly the same words that the BJP’s publicity mediums use.

In Uttar Pradesh, it is also about the Yogi Adityanath government, which spends Rs1,450 crore annually to advertise its achievements, often using facts and figures that appear to be different from the data given by external agencies and even the Union government. On law and order, Adityanath’s USP is the much hyped “iron hand” with which he is purported to have contained crime in a “lawless” Uttar Pradesh. It is symbolised by the bulldozer, but many questions have been raised on the constitutional validity of such extreme measures.

Since March 2017, when Adityanath became chief minister, 193 alleged criminals have been gunned down in 10,913 encounters. The encounters left more than 5,100 alleged criminals wounded; under what is known as ‘Operation Langda’, they were shot in the legs and left lame. Human rights activists and some political parties did raise their voice against the encounters, but in vain.

The state government’s tall claims on women’s security do not match with the data provided by the National Crime Records Bureau, which puts the state on top of the list in rapes. As per the 2021-22 report of the NCRB, Uttar Pradesh reports a rape every seven hours. Claims about mahila samman (respect for women) sounded hollow when the government ignored the pleas of Olympian women wrestlers for action against BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh who allegedly exploited them sexually during his long stint as the head of the Wrestling Federation of India.

The BJP’s poll strategy seems to hinge on the hope that issues that could hurt it might get lost in the cloud of communal polarisation. “You can see how the ruling party is out to divide our society on communal lines by raising the pitch on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act once again,” said Eram Rizvi, a young social activist from Lucknow.

Rizvi was in the news when she spearheaded the anti-CAA protest at Lucknow’s historic Clock Tower that was compared to Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh protest in 2019-20. Many women were ill-treated by the police at that time in Lucknow. That has not deterred Rizvi from sticking her neck out again. “We will protest again,” she said. “Like Hanuman ji’s vanar sena, our mahila shakti sena will burn down this new Lanka of the powers that be.”

Discrimination faced by Muslims continues, despite claims of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. Shahid Hussain, an engineer-turned-contractor, said after the Adityanath government had come to power, he was no longer getting the kind of work he used to get earlier. “More often than not, it is clear that the reason is my name.”

Mohammad Shafaeen Quraishi, who runs a modest mobile phone shop in Lucknow, said Muslims continued to have very cordial relations with a majority of the Hindus and that ordinary Hindus were always there to help a Muslim in need. “But the BJP people look down upon us and discriminate quite openly by accusing us of being communal,” he said. Significantly, most Muslims are convinced that the discrimination is only aimed at polarising the Hindu vote. “The most dangerous thing is that Muslims of today are asked to answer for the acts of their forefathers who lived here centuries ago. That only breeds hatred against the community at large,” said Colonel Fasih Ahmed (retd), from Lucknow.

While support for the BJP and Modi is visible everywhere, there is also a silent majority which seeks to question the BJP. “We can see how these people are trying hard to create a sharp Hindu-Muslim divide in society. But the manner in which this fervour is going viral also compels me to wonder if many of us had this inherent trait, while we thought we were truly secular people,” said a professor of political science at a Lucknow-based university. “The saving grace, however, is that there are still many people who can see through the game being played by the hindutva fringe to vitiate the atmosphere. But they are not able to muster the courage to speak out.”