SP’s victory: 2007 redux and the unanswered questions

It is 2007 redux.Mulayam Singh Yadav, the then chief minister, was up against an anti-incumbency wave. Goons had broken loose in Uttar Pradesh and the law and order situation was precarious. His chief lieutenant Amar Singh had veered off the party’s socialist moorings to turn it into a rich man’s club. Film stars, industrialist and power brokers of different hues gave the party an image that was hardly in sync with its rural voters base.The Yadavs cornered all the benefits and the cases of caste atrocities were dangerously up. There was rampant corruption too. People were frustrated and angry. The run-up to the polls that year showed no big wave for any party. But the results were astounding. The voters in UP had voted overwhelmingly against the SP, and Mayawati’s BSP was the beneficiary.Cut to 2012. The popular perception had turned sharply against Mayawati. She was guilty of the same crimes as Mulayam of 2007, only worse in degrees in certain areas. Most pollsters missed the wave against the BSP. In hindsight, it was too big a wave to be missed. But blame it on the UP voter; he is good at hedging his bet.[caption id="attachment_236697" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="The Samajwadi Party president greets his supporters at the party office in Lucknow on Tuesday. Nand Kumar/PTI"][/caption]So how do you decipher the UP vote? The SP’s victory is no surprise, its landslide victory is. The anti-incumbency mood was palpable in the run-up to the election. The anti-BSP votes were expected to go to the only other strong political alternative in the state: the SP. The Congress and the BJP are too weak to present themselves as reliable alternatives.Moreover, the UP voter seems to be fed up with the idea of hung houses — prior to 2007, there was a long spell of instability in UP because of fractured mandates — and that is possibly one reason he makes his mandate clear. There is no easy way to explain it but it is possible that UP’s politics has entered an era of stability with the emergence of two clear choices. As the seat share of the national parties suggest they have been rejected by a majority of the voters.But that still does not explain the massive victory. As the voting pattern suggests the regional parties retain their core votes — the Dalits in case of the BSP and the Yadav-Muslim combination in case of the SP. But the plus votes Mayawati secured in the last election has swung away from her. A section of her Dalit vote bank, as post-poll surveys suggest, seems to have broken away from the BSP this time as well.The vote is largely against Mayawati than for the SP. But SP benefits from being the only other option available. Yes, the party had worked hard for over two years to rebuild its image, thanks to the efforts of Akhilesh Yadav. The party’s campaign was subdued but purposeful. There were no film stars in the party’s campaign, no effort to overwhelm the electorate by show of money power and goondas were out of the picture.But there could be other factors that could have contributed to its big victory, mostly the tactical mistakes from rivals. The suggestion from Sriprakash Jaiswal that the state could be headed for President’s rule in case the Congress did not get enough seats could have driven voters to the SP. The UP voter, like we mentioned earlier, is wary of the uncertainty arising out of hung houses. Again, it is possible that it benefited from the high pitched Congress campaign against corruption and misgovernance under Mayawati — that in case is the Congress’s claim. It had been pretty subdued in its attack on the BSP for most part of its early campaigning.The BSP took its Dalit vote bank for granted and shifted focus to the sarvajan plank. This plank which spelt success for her in 2007, was a wasted effort this time. The Brahmins and upper castes had already moved away from her. The SP made inroads into her Dalit base. It is also likely that the SP doubled its efforts to woo the Muslim vote after the Congress sought some kind of polarisation by harping on quotas and sub-quotas.However, we will get a clearer picture once the full statistics is made public. The numbers will provide us the tool to decipher SP’s victory.