New Delhi, India – It was April 1st, All Fools’ Day.
The elections in India had not yet begun, but columnists based in Delhi were already giving their verdict on the biggest prize of all: Uttar Pradesh (UP), the northern state that is the country’s largest and which sends the largest number of legislators to the country’s parliament. . The state’s 80 members of parliament, in a house of 543, often make or break the national government.
In 2014 and 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party made a fortune, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party winning 71 and 62 seats in those two elections. Columnists predicted a repeat, a done deal for the BJP.
But Hakim Sahib, a full-time beggar and part-time politician from Meerut, a city in western Uttar Pradesh (UP), was not amused. “The BJP will not win more than 40 seats in UP because there is a strong bias against the party,” he told this writer.
Two months later, when the results were announced on June 4, after seven phases of staggered voting, Sahib, it seems, had been prescient, unlike the vast majority of pollsters who predicted a BJP victory in UP and in India.
As the election campaign unfolded in a state of more than 200 million people, the signs were there: Modi and the BJP were clearly a powerful force, but there was also palpable, simmering anger among many voters – including traditional supporters – at high echelons. unemployment and inflation. A clever strategy by the INDIA opposition alliance turned the BJP’s campaign slogan seeking 400 seats in parliament into a narrative against the ruling party: The opposition claimed that the BJP could take away the constitutional rights of historically disadvantaged communities such as Dalits – who they are at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy — with such a broad mandate.
All of this bore fruit in the result that Sahib had predicted: the BJP ended up with just 33 seats, with its allies winning three more. The regional Samajwadi Party, a member of the Congress Party-led INDIA alliance, won 37 seats. Congress itself won six more. This result, along with losses in the western state of Maharashtra, forced the BJP to rely on alliance partners to form a government, without a national majority of its own.
The rumors that led to this moment were not restricted to traditional critics of the BJP. Some rank-and-file voters who drove his rise also felt disillusioned.
Fall in Ayodhya, fall in Varanasi
In 1992, the BJP led a campaign that culminated in the demolition of the 16th-century Babri mosque in the UP temple town of Ayodhya. On December 6 of that year, when images of the shrine being demolished stunned the rest of India and shocked the world, Mohan was at the scene, part of the crowd that turned the mosque into rubble.
In January this year, Modi consecrated a grand Ram temple at the same location: the Hindu deity Ram, according to ancient scriptures, was born in Ayodhya. It was a moment that – like the 1992 demolition – was shown around the world and emerged as the launch pad for Modi’s 2024 re-election campaign.
But when this writer spoke to Mohan – who requested that his surname not be used – in April, he made it clear that he had quit the BJP. He has an unemployed son, who was initially tempted to join the Modi government’s scheme to send Indian workers to Israel as laborers in the midst of the war in Gaza. The son ended up refusing this option.
“This time the BJP will not come to power in the parliamentary elections. I will call you on June 4 to confirm this,” said Mohan.
He was partly wrong – the BJP is ready to form the next government, with its allies. However, in Faizabad, the constituency that includes the Ram temple, the BJP lost. And Mohan’s comments were reflected in sentiments that voters shared even in Modi’s parliamentary constituency, Varanasi.
His endorsement is visible in the infrastructure development works throughout the city: a highway to the airport; they cleaned the banks of the Ganges; Widened roads to Varanasi’s biggest attraction, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple.
But these changes have stolen the city’s identity, said Vishambhar Mishra, a professor at the city’s Indian Institute of Technology and head of the Sankat Mochan Trust, which campaigns to clean the Ganges.
“Varanasi used to be the city of alleys and alleys. People could start from anywhere and negotiate the lanes to reach the ghats and take a dip in the Ganges,” he said. Meanwhile, the Ganges remains dirty despite the government’s multiple promises to clean it – a contradiction it routinely highlights in posts on social media platform X.
On the Ganges, boatman Bhanu Chaudhary, who took this writer for a ride, said: “There is a lot of anger among people because there are no jobs.” Chaudhary has graduated, but is forced to row boats for visitors to the city because he has no other job.
This anger manifested itself on June 4th. Modi won the seat, but with his margin drastically reduced, from 480,000 votes in 2019 to 152,000 this time. Many of the constituencies near Varanasi, which the BJP hoped to win with Modi’s presence in the city, went to the INDIA alliance.
Losing the Dalit vote
But the biggest reason for voters turning away from the BJP may have been the party’s own statements, observers say.
The slogan insisting that the BJP-led alliance would win 400 seats scared many Dalits, who feared that the party might change the constitution – the drafting of which was led by Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar – to deny them hard-won protections, said Inderjit Singh, a professor in Gorakhpur, a town in northern UP. “So many seats slipped away from the BJP group,” he said.
The INDIA opposition alliance, early data suggests, has successfully brought together a coalition of Dalits, other traditionally disadvantaged communities – known as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in India – and Muslims in many parts of the state.
“They want to change India’s constitution and end job reservation,” said Gautam Rane, a Dalit activist who campaigned against the BJP. The BJP has denied that it ever had any intention of taking away benefits that Dalits are promised in the constitution, including quotas in government jobs and educational institutions.
Rane said many Dalit voters abandoned the Bahujan Samaj Party, which had long led the community in UP, because they felt it was now too weak to take on the BJP. The BSP still obtained 9 percent of the state’s votes, but lost in all constituencies: it won 10 seats in 2019.
Meanwhile, Modi’s comments against Muslims during the campaign – he referred to them as “infiltrators” – galvanized the community, which constitutes nearly 20% of UP’s population, behind the opposition alliance, said Nawab Hussain Afsar, editor of an Urdu daily based in Lucknow, the state capital.
And they counterattacked, with their votes.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
