In a few months from now, India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, home to nearly 24 crore people, will choose its government. While the outcome of the 2022 assembly elections will be in a way a referendum on incumbent chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s performance, for others like the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress, it will be a do-or-die battle.
No wonder then that parties are going all out to woo voters outside the ambit of their respective caste bases. Among the state’s upper castes, around 19%, numerically and socially Brahmins are the most dominant, with 12% of the population, and form about 20% of the voters in eastern UP. Traditionally, Brahmins along with Muslims and Dalits once formed the core of the Congress voter base in the state. With time and change in the political landscape, the majority from these three sections moved to different stables.
The Brahmin factor
Unlike other north Indian states where Brahmin influence is more around the social sphere, in Uttar Pradesh, the community, along with some other dominant castes, forms the core of the state’s electoral politics. The Brahmins’ political centrality and their initial support to the Congress party could be understood from the fact all the five Brahmin chief ministers of the state were Congressmen, including Govind Ballabh Pant, the state’s first chief minister, apart from Kamalapati Tripathi, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, ND Tiwari and Sripati Mishra.
However, the ‘Mandal’ followed by ‘Kamandal’ politics that began in the early 1990s altered the established political equations in the state. The nationwide weakening and decline of the Congress led to a rethink among the Brahmin elites. Quota in government jobs, where they once dominated, weakening of political clout due to coming together of backward castes, led the community to another rapidly rising political venture riding on the back of the Ram Mandir agitation – the BJP, then termed a Brahmin-Bania party due to its core support base.
But this affair with the saffron camp at the time was fragile with the Brahmins’ wish for the top post and share in power remaining unfulfilled. The BJP, desperate to expand its social base, chose OBC leaders like Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta and later Rajnath Singh, a Thakur – an upper caste with which Brahmins’ fault line exists for long– as its chief minister.
The BSP led by Mayawati, with Dalit votes decisively on her side, was quick to sense the community’s restlessness and longing for a share in power. A section of Brahmins, too, pushed to the walls and in political bewilderment, went along with the BSP’s call for Brahmin-Dalit unity.
The once unthinkable social alliance– due to class and economic differences – worked magic for both the BSP and the Brahmins in the 2007 assembly polls. Mayawati got power, Brahmins their long-cherished share in it.
Though just 17 per cent amongst the Brahmins voted for the BSP candidates, according to a Lokniti CSDS post-poll survey, this move changed the political power calculus in the state.
The BSP tally rose to 206 seats in the 2007 assembly polls, up from just 98 that the Dalit party had won in 2002 in the 403-member house. The party’s vote share too went up from 23.06% in 2002 to 30.43%. All the major parties witnessed a fall in their respective vote shares. Mayawati had fielded 86 Brahmins in the polls, according to a report in the Economic and Political Weekly.
However, as pointed out by the Lokniti CSDS post-poll survey, Brahmins, wooed by an aggressive Hindutva pitch, soon moved back overwhelmingly under the saffron umbrella. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, 72% of Brahmins voted for the BJP. This number rose to 80% in the 2017 assembly elections and further to 82% in the last Lok Sabha polls that gave Narendra Modi his second term in the prime minister’s office, according to Lokniti CSDS findings.
Now with the assembly polls round the corner, political parties are going all out to woo the community which, many say, is disenchanted with the ruling party for not getting an adequate share in power and for being side-lined over Thakurs in the state’s power equation.
The Dalit formula
Among the OBCs, approximated to be around 41% of the UP population, the largest grouping is that of Yadavs. Estimates about their population vary widely depending on whom you are asking the question. However, a safe guesstimate suggests their number to be around 10-12%. Like Brahmins, this caste too voted for the Congress in the initial post-Independence elections with a section from the community briefly flirting with the Left and socialist parties. However, post the Mandal agitation, they solidly backed the Janata bandwagon.
With Mulayam Singh Yadav forming the Samajwadi Party in 1992, the Yadavs moved under the socialist party umbrella. There is almost no dithering in the mass support of the community to the SP since then, the exception being the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls when 27% and 23% of Yadav voters respectively backed the BJP, according to Lokniti findings.
Among Dalits, a large chunk of the two core components – Jatavs and non-Jatavs including Pasis– like other groupings, voted for the grand old party till 1977, when the community’s vote got divided between the Congress and socialist camp, especially the Janata Party and later the Janata Dal. The emergence of the BSP on the country’s political scene, however, turned their voting preference towards the Dalit party. The community forms over 20% of UP’s population, according to the 2011 census.
This intra-caste fault line that started appearing soon after the 2007 assembly polls, primarily due to the preferential treatment the Jatavs got in the party, has grown further with time. It was no surprise that around 45% of other SCs or the non-Jatav Dalits voted for the BJP-led coalition in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. This number rose to 48% in the 2019 general elections, according to Lokniti CSDS post-poll findings.
The BSP, on the other hand, has resolute backing of the Jatavs with 68% of the sub-caste voting for it in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. This number further rose to 75% in the 2019 edition when the BSP was part of the Mahagathbandhan that opposed the NDA in the state. In the 2017 assembly polls, an overwhelming 86.7% of the Jatavs, according to the Lokniti survey, backed the BSP.
Like Brahmins, Thakurs (Rajputs) – around 7% of the state’s population and arch-rival to the Brahmins in UP politics – too have moved from voting for the Congress to other parties, their latest stop being the BJP.
The political clout of the community can be understood from the fact that it has given two successive prime ministers – VP Singh (1989) and Chandra Shekhar (1990) and five chief ministers, including the incumbent Yogi Adityanath.
A section of the community moved briefly under the Samajwadi Party’s sphere when Amar Singh commanded a respectable position under Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tutelage. However, the advent of Narendra Modi and later Yogi Adityanath has led them to firmly back the BJP, a fact corroborated by the Lokniti survey that says 77% and 89% from the community voted for the saffron party in 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls respectively.
Emergence of non-Yadav OBCs
It’s the non-Yadav OBCs, though, that of late have evolved as a major political force in the state. Constituting around 35% of UP’s population, this rainbow of various heterogeneous non-dominant castes including Kurmis, Mauryas, Kashyaps, Sainis, Sahus, etc, could single-handedly decide which party will have an upper hand in the polls.
Following the Mandal movement, most of these groups started backing the socialist parties, including the SP. However, given the massive influence of the Yadavs in the Akhilesh Yadav-led party and the BJP’s outreach towards them, they have overwhelmingly entered the saffron camp.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself coming from the OBC community too has impacted their voting preference besides the NDA government aggressively wooing them with posts and policies. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP fielded 27 non-OBCs in Uttar Pradesh, nine more than the opposition Mahagathbandhan that included the SP and BSP, according to an Indian Express report.
According to the Lokniti survey, 61% from the non-dominant OBC block backed the NDA in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in the state. This number rose to 72% in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP’s vote share in the state rose from 42.6% in 2014 to 49.9% in the last parliamentary polls.
Among the Kurmis and Koeris, numerically the strongest among the backward castes after the Yadavs, 53% and 80% voted for the NDA in the 2014 and 2019 parliamentary polls respectively.
The Jats, currently at the helm of ongoing farm protests, form around 2% of Uttar Pradesh’s population. Mostly an agrarian class, the community had an umbilical cord connect with Chaudhary Charan Singh and his politics. A large section of Jat voters moved along with him when he left the Congress in 1967 to form his own political party, the Bharatiya Kranti Dal and then the Bharatiya Lok Dal (1974).
Later, the Jats backed the Janata dispensation after Charan Singh joined the socialist grouping. Though the Ram Mandir movement dented the rock-solid support the community had for the Chaudhary family, the majority of Jats still backed Ajit Singh, Charan Singh’s son, who later formed the Rashtriya Lok Dal in 1996. Chaudhary Charan Singh and later Ajit Singh’s politics was based on Jat-Muslim unity and it paid off quite well until the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots queered the pitch for the RLD.
The Hindu-Muslim communal clashes which polarised the whole of western Uttar Pradesh led to the Jats moving under the BJP umbrella. This political realignment of the community is also recorded by the successive Lokniti CSDS post-poll surveys. In the 2012 assembly polls, just 7% of Jats backed the BJP. About two years later, this number rose dramatically to 77% in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and further to 91% in the 209 parliamentary polls in 2019.
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