UP polls: Not a foregone conclusion as people shun fear

Farm protests have eased the sense of fear, but the big question is - how much difference would money make in a close fight?

For the first time in its 374-year history, the animal fair at the temple town of Bateshwar, near Agra, was cancelled in 2020 due to the global pandemic. It is back again.

Located at the banks of river Yamuna, the Bateshwar fair has had a subdued revival after a gap of two years. Horses, camels and their owners have returned to this dusty patch of land looking for customers and a good price. In an economy battered by a merciless pandemic, there are fewer customers for animals and far fewer tourists, who used to flock in big numbers to this birthplace of late Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which boasts of 108 Shiva temples of considerable antiquity.

Now it is possible to purchase horses or mares from prices that range from Rs 10,000 to Rs 10 lakh when in good times they would go up to a few crores for the prized animals. "There is no money in the market," one can hear the sellers complain.

Horse breeders are not alone in displaying a grouse about the paucity of funds brought upon the masses by the pandemic and its poor government handling. The plight of the opposition parties is no better. They, too, are struggling to raise the necessary funds to mount a challenge to the well-greased election machinery of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh, which goes to the polls in February 2022.

The BJP has begun to organise mega rallies, many of which display the government's imprimatur, like the flag-off of the eastern UP highway, amongst other events. The Congress and Samajwadi Party are pinning their hopes on imagining new ways to counter the ruling party's narrative of government's achievements, much of which is based on dodgy statistics.

Wall to wall advertising of the government's achievements on every media platform has left space for no other narrative. Hence the success of the opposition parties would rest on their ability to defeat the government's muscular narrative by stoking people's memories of job losses, deaths and suffering they encountered during the lockdown and the second wave of the pandemic exacerbated by indifferent governance.

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Compared to the nearly 22,000 deaths that the UP government officially shows as due to the pandemic, researchers estimate them to be much higher. An opposition politician, who travelled across the state, claims that each of the state's 95,000 odd villages lost between five to 25 people to the coronavirus. A group of independent researchers has suggested that hundreds of thousands of people may have perished in their search for better medical intervention after they got the virus.

Will Hindutva trump poor governance?

However, the reason the BJP will benefit is not from the state government's vaccination drive but the considerable effort that UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has put in polarising the state on communal lines and making the minority vote irrelevant.

Besides beginning the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya and building its brand equity, the government has gone about saffronising Uttar Pradesh. Names of cities have been changed. Worse, Adityanath has tried to show his ill-informed constituents that the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban constitutes a real and present danger to the safety of innocent Hindus. Bombastically, he has threatened to bomb the Taliban (wonder where) if they attacked.

Adityanath's anti-Muslim rhetoric falls into a pattern of sorts. Since he came to power in Lucknow, he has tried to project criminal underworld with the minority community. His many admirers excitedly inform how properties of underworld don Atiq Ahmed, Mukhtar Ansari and others that the administration has seized. The CM brought in the same aggression when dealing with those protesting against the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019. Several civil society activists were incarcerated, and many are still languishing as undertrials in jail.

Giant hoardings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Adityanath dot the landscape and could create an impression of invincibility. However, those who speak favourably to outsiders about five years of the BJP rule do that out of fear. The reason is not only the heavy hand with which the state administration put down the anti-CAA protests but it's been brutal in suppressing democratic demonstrations. Opposition politicians complain that the police has suppressed them by resorting to extreme violence.

Also Read — BJP in lead, but losing 108 seats to SP in UP; Congress fighting back in Uttarakhand, Punjab: Poll

Farm protests help lift the sense of fear

But now, the fear has begun to lift. Much of the credit should go to the protests against the farm laws enacted by the central government. Despite the severity of elements and an unfriendly administration, the farmers have been protesting at different venues. Scores have died too. The egregious assault on them in Lakhimpur Kheri and the administration's initial defence of the accused who led his motorcade into the defenceless farmers has shown what the dissenters have had to contend with.

As the fear lifts, the mood for change is gathering momentum. Recent opinion surveys now show that instead of the inevitability of the BJP's return to power, doubts have begun to show up. A few months ago, all opinion polls, including the local ones, showed the BJP winning some 300+ seats, and now they are pottering around at 210 odd with the Samajwadi Party snapping at its heels.

As the state draws nearer to the polls, it could be far closer to elections than the BJP would want. Bureaucrats in Lucknow have begun to sense this mood better. They have started to reach out to SP leader Akhilesh Yadav for favourable accommodation if his party comes to power. Priyanka Gandhi's exertions will also accentuate this anti-incumbency mood even if her Congress party cannot benefit from it.

The big question remains - how much difference would money make in a close fight?

(The writer is Editor of the Delhi-based magazine, Hardnews)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.