Seventy-three seats out of 80 in 2014 amid a Modi wave as the opposition stood fractured, 64 seats in 2019 when the entire opposition united against the BJP, but a near collapse in 2024 when the BSP and RLD left the opposition alliance fold with the NDA hovering around 37 seats.
The Uttar Pradesh debacle for the Bharatiya Janata Party is confirming what was said in hushed tones in the party corridors – that there were differences amid the BJP leadership on what strategy was to be followed in the candidate selection in the state. A few incumbent MPs were dropped in Uttar Pradesh this time and most of the repeated candidates lost. People spoke of overbearing Thakurvaad politics in the state that had offended the Brahmins, Rajputs, and some OBCs. Further, rural distress and Muslim consolidation have worked against the BJP.
The big question now is: who will take the blame for this fiasco?
Such is the scale of the debacle that union minister Smriti Irani has lost from Amethi by over 1 lakh votes despite Rahul Gandhi not contesting from there. The Congress leader has won from Raebareli by a whopping 3.7 lakh votes, doubling the margin of his mother Sonia Gandhi from 2019. The BJP has lost the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat under which Ayodhya falls as incumbent MP Lalu Singh has been defeated. There is a wipeout in the Yadav belt and eastern UP (Purvanchal) for the BJP – the latter is the stronghold of chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
For the Samajwadi Party, this appears to be the best performance in UP in a Lok Sabha election. The SP is poised to be the third biggest party in the country in terms of MPs, after the BJP and Congress. With a potential 35 seats, Akhilesh Yadav could equal his father Mulayam Singh Yadav’s all-time record of 1999.
Akhilesh Yadav’s candidature from Kannauj has seemingly proved to be a masterstroke, with the SP sweeping the Yadav belt. His decision to ally with the Congress consolidated Muslim votes and, along with the Yadav voters, a formidable coalition was formed. The SP gave 17 seats to the Congress and the latter is winning as many as seven seats, including Allahabad and Barabanki.
Ground report
On the ground in the biggest state, News18 found Uttar Pradesh as one example where the appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was supplemented by a popular chief minister in Yogi Adityanath. People appreciated the free ration, and they applauded safety and security. But this was overshadowed by the rural distress due to unemployment and inflation, and the utility of the iron hand bulldozer politics seemed to have run its course. The fervour created by the Ram temple pran pratishtha (consecration) this January also had ebbed.
The BJP has often been criticised for having “weak chief ministers” and leaning heavily on the appeal of Narendra Modi in states. The situation in UP had been quite different till 2022 when Yogi created history by repeating a second term. But the “Baba ka bulldozer” model ran into the reservation pitch of the opposition this time and a cohesive SP-Congress alliance was able to ring a bell amongst the electorate regarding the return of Mandal politics and a caste census. In UP’s villages, the fear of losing reservation as projected by SP was real.
Dalit voters seemed to have leaned towards the SP-Congress combine for that reason. The BJP thought a turning point in the campaign was Rahul Gandhi choosing not to contest from Amethi but go for the safer option of Raebareli. But this was not to be. Rather, Akhilesh Yadav’s decision to take the plunge from Kannauj settled the political narrative in UP in the SP’s favour.
Battle for 2027 hots up
The big haul for the SP-Congress alliance with about 42 seats opens up the battle for the 2027 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh with Yogi Adityanath now facing a tough challenge from a resurgent Akhilesh Yadav. Akhilesh had reduced the BJP’s seats in the last assembly election too but that was not enough. The SP-Congress alliance will now be resurgent, especially with the complete decline of Mayawati, and Dalit voters deserting the Bahujan Samaj Party.
The BJP had its back to the wall before 2014 in Uttar Pradesh as the regional outfits, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, had a firm grip over power. The BJP won 10 seats in UP in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, less than half of the Congress’s 21. The saffron party knew that if it was to come to power in the country in 2014, it needed to win in UP and win big. This was why with Narendra Modi being projected as the PM face, the party sent his key lieutenant Amit Shah as in-charge of Uttar Pradesh and he camped there.
The SP, which was in power in the state, the BSP, and the Congress fought separately and misread the public mood in favour of the BJP. The result was the NDA winning a historic 73 seats in the state and more than doubling its vote share to 43 per cent. PM Modi contested from Varanasi – a move that proved to be a masterstroke as UP came to be closely associated with him as he struck an emotional chord with the people of the state. UP, which often gave the country prime ministers, was adopted by Modi to become one.
This also paved the way for the BJP to win Uttar Pradesh in 2017 comprehensively after a long gap despite an SP-Congress alliance, and Modi installed an unlikely candidate in Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. The saffron-clad monk proved true to form as he used an iron hand to check organised crime and mafia in the state, rolled out the bulldozer against elements considered politically untouchable, and vowed to root out corruption.
The opposition was quick to smell the formidable challenge and Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati buried the hatchet to join hands in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in UP, planning a repeat of Bihar where arch-rivals Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad had teamed up to stop the BJP victory chariot. With Rashtriya Lok Dal also by their side, the SP-BSP combine had a grand dream to stop Modi’s victory march through UP. But the effort failed, strengthening the Modi-Yogi UP double-engine.
The NDA still notched up 64 seats in Uttar Pradesh despite the formidable caste equation on the other side – in fact, the untold story of 2019 is how the alliance upped its vote share from 2014 and crossed the 50 per cent mark. The result was that the SP-BSP coalition broke soon after the election results. 2022 saw Yogi Adityanath win power again in UP – the first CM to do so in over three decades in the state.
Come 2024, the situation seems to have changed for the BJP. The party may need a course correction in the key state ahead of 2027.
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