The Election Battle Begins/In 2007, Ms. Mayawati’s party won 206 out of 403 seats as she had been able to stitch together an umbrella castecoalition

Politics Journal: The Election Battle Begins

By Jyoti Malhotra

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A supporter of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati waved his hands during an election rally in Lucknow, Dec. 18.

A major political battle has begun in India with the announcement of elections in five states – Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur – in the first two months of next year with the results to be released March 4. They promise to change the way the country will be run in the years before the next general election.

Already, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s success in pushing through the lower house of Parliament a bill to create a national anticorruption ombudsman, called the Lokpal, seems to have taken some of the wind out of the sails of the Anna Hazare’s civil society movement even as the activist fasts in Mumbai for the second day today.

With the announcement of the elections, it is as if Team Anna’s recent political shadow-boxing against Congress must now make way for the real thing in India’s most populous state and the biggest electoral prize on offer, Uttar Pradesh. It will be a three-way war at the hustings between: Dalit leader and Chief Minister Kumari Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party; Congress, led in this campaign by General Secretary Rahul Gandhi; and father-son duo Mulayam and Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party.

The fact that both Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav, heirs-apparent to the Congress and Samajwadi parties respectively, are being considered as somewhat respectable opponents to Ms. Mayawati speaks volumes of the distance both leaders have travelled since the last elections in 2007 – as well as Ms. Mayawati’s fraying control over her state.

The Election Battle Begins

Political observers across the spectrum say that anger against Ms. Mayawati’s extravagant expenditure on the statues of Dalit leaders, including herself, across the state has become a lightning rod for the general exasperation against her government’s inability to carry out serious developmental work.


Under the circumstances, Ms. Mayawati’s core Dalit supporters will continue to support her but there could be a fracturing of the vote from other castes, including Brahmins. In 2007, Ms. Mayawati’s party won 206 out of 403 seats in the UP assembly because she had been able to stitch together an umbrella caste coalition between the upper, lower and backward castes.

With anger against Ms. Mayawati rising, the Samajwadi Party and Congress have jumped in. Congress, especially, has made full use of its power as head of the federal government to dole out freebies to the people of Uttar Pradesh. Officials know that the state – with 80 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, in New Delhi – will show the way to the victorious party in the 2014 general elections.

That is why, over the last couple of weeks, Congress has feverishly announced several developmental works, including the building of a couple of dams and a 4.5% job quota for Muslims across the country. Nearly 20% of UP’s population is Muslim.

Congress hopes to win back the Muslims from Ms. Mayawati and prevent them from voting with the Samajwadi Party. But the Samajwadi Party, whose credibility among UP’s Muslims is solid, points out that Congress — beyond Mr. Gandhi — hardly has any state leaders of stature in UP.

“Once Rahul returns to Delhi, what is to become of the people of UP?” a Samajwadi Party leader said tauntingly to India Real Time.

But several UP Muslims, both Shia and Sunni, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they had decided to vote for the Congress this time because they wanted to give “‘Rahul baba’ a chance.”

If Congress is able to win between 80 and 100 assembly seats in the UP elections, one school of thought within the party believes it might be a good idea to tie up with the Samajwadi party against Ms. Mayawati in the hopes of forming a state government.

If that happens, the complexion of the UPA government at the federal level will also change, allowing Congress to bank on the Samajwadi party and much less on the whims of mercurial allies like the Trinamool Congress.

It’s not as if the Congress and the Samajwadi party have not been allied before. In the first UPA government, after the Left pulled the rug from under Congress’s feet when Manmohan Singh decided to stick by the nuclear deal with the U.S., it was the Samajwadi Party that came to its aid.

Political observers say it is possible that experiment is repeated in UP, this time with the Samajwadi Party in the lead role.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hazare prepares to try to embarrasses Congress further with a new fast in Mumbai. But after seeking a discount on hiring a large public ground in Mumbai, it is perhaps Team Anna that has been embarrassed. And the switch of his fasting site from Delhi to Mumbai has presented Parliament’s Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav earthy witticism – with some new material.

He told the Indian Express that Anna and his team were behaving like dictators and that civil society groups like his wanted to take over the work of Parliament.

‘Dilli mein kadke ka thandak hai to aap Maharashtra ja rahen hai. Lekin vahan Bal Thackeray sahib ne kaha ki koi Lokpal ki zaroorat nahi hai,” Mr. Yadav said in Parliament last week. Translation: With Delhi in the grip of a cold winter, you’re moving your fast to Maharashtra, but even there (Shiv Sena) leader Bal Thackeray has said that there is no need for a Lokpal Bill.”

For the first time in many months, it did seem as if the joke was on Anna Hazare.

Jyoti Malhotra is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. She writes for India’s Business Standard daily and for Pakistan’s Express Tribune.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.