Uttar Pradesh elections: The challenges before Yogi Adityanath

On September 18, 2018, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was handed over a rather unusual letter that called for immediate action. Unusual, as it was signed by close to 400 members across parties from the two houses of the state’s legislature. Given its electoral strength, most signatories were from the BJP. The first two signatures on the letter were of assembly speaker Hriday Narayan Dikshit (denied a ticket this time) and Legislative Council chairman Ramesh Yadav.

The letter asked for a periodical increase and revision in pay and pension of serving and former legislators, and for making these tax-free. It said that legislators in the state were unable to perform the roles for which they had been elected. One reason was the vidhyak nidhi (MLA fund) of Rs4 crore was much lower than what legislators in other states were entitled to.

It was not an issue new to Adityanath. After all, he had served as chairperson of the Joint Committee on Salaries and Allowances of Members of Parliament from September 2014-2017.

“And yet he did nothing,” said Madhukar Jetley, Samajwadi Party MLC. “Many times, I approached him and he said that he would give me time soon to discuss the manner in which it was to be taken up, but that soon never came. He humiliated his legislators.”

On February 28, 2020, Adityanath announced on the floor of the house the formation of a committee to look into the matter. However, Covid-19 struck soon after and nothing came of that.

“How do you support a chief minister who does not stand up for his own legislators?” said a signatory to the letter, a copy of which is with THE WEEK.

Inaccessibility and indifference to his legislators are oft-repeated charges against Adityanath. In turn, he does not inspire loyalty.

Bala Prasad Awasthi, MLA from Dhaurahra, who recently resigned from the BJP, said that despite his years of experience he felt “invisible” in this regime. “I was a four-time MLA, but did not have much to contribute,” he said. “I will have to think hard to describe my experience with this government.”

In December 2019, 200 BJP MLAs sat on a dharna in the house against the chief minister. Their grouse was that the CM’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy had emboldened officials to a level where they refused to even listen to elected representatives.

Among the MLAs who took on the government publicly on multiple issues was Deomani Dwivedi, party MLA from Lambhua. The most serious of the issues he highlighted was the charge that the government was unconcerned about the wellbeing of Brahmins. Adityanath has also been accused of preferring his own caste (Thakur) over Brahmins.

In August 2020, Dwivedi wrote to the assembly’s principal secretary to give notice of a question that demanded to know the situation of Brahmins in the state. The question read: “In the more than three and a half years of the tenure of the BJP government, how many Brahmins have been killed in the state, how many killers have been arrested.... What is the government doing to protect Brahmins? Will the government give arms licences to Brahmins on a priority?”

Before the ticket to Lambhua was announced, Dwivedi was wary of repeating his charges against the government or stating whether his concerns were addressed. Instead, he offered a philosophical take on his party. “The system does not react,” he said. “It responds at the level of thought and action. In such a big party, even if a small part falls out of alignment, it is readjusted and reoriented. There is a continuous process of improvement. One does not need to say anything.” His cautious approach though did not earn him a ticket; Sitaram Verma is the BJP candidate from Lambhua.

Those out of the party are more forthcoming. Mukesh Varma, former BJP MLA from Shikohabad, said, “We (dalits and backwards) were only used to grab votes. After that there was no use for us. So what was the need to give us any respect?”

DISGRUNTLED DALITS

On January 19, Manoj Paswan joined the Samajwadi Party with 200 trained party workers. Amid the big names that joined the Samajwadi Party that week, this was a relatively underreported move. But it was an important one. Paswan had served as local representative of Kaushal Kishore, BJP MP from the reserved seat of Mohanlalganj, and thus had seen from close how the government functioned.

“For life to change for dalits, policies need to change,” said Paswan. “This government did not show the slightest inclination to do that. Handing out foodgrains and soaps does not change their lived reality.”

For Paswan, the turning point, however, was his MP’s attempts to get a hostel for scheduled caste students in his constituency. “We even met the CM, but nothing came of it,” he said. It then dawned on him that if a MP could not get anything done, there was no chance an ordinary dalit would matter to this government. He also points to the fact that there was but a single dalit minister in the government, even though the BJP was the party that got the second greatest chunk of non-Jatav dalit votes in the 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections.

Paswan’s realisation is not unique to him. Over the last three decades, hindutva—the larger umbrella cover for Hindu castes—has been locked in a battle of supremacy with smaller caste identities. In the last decade, hindutva has emerged the winner. However, as Prashant Trivedi, assistant professor at the Giri Institute of Development Studies, explained, there is a social churning among the backwards and dalits. “They realise that hindutva is dominated by upper castes,” he said. “If they ever did perceive that hindutva would have space for their identities and aspirations, the appointment of Yogi Adityanath as CM ruined it. Till there was a veil like, say, Kalyan Singh, an all-inclusive hindutva was possible, but with Adityanath it did not take long to realise its completely upper caste nature.” Even the BJP had realised the damage Adityanath’s appointment had done to its hindutva vote bank, he said.

It is to counter some of this upper caste hindutva tilt that most programmes in the state in the run-up to the polls—be it the foundation laying of the Ganga Expressway or the inauguration of the Purvanchal Expressway—were billed and presented as solo shows of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Ajay Kumar, assistant professor in the department of sociology at the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, said that while there was a churn among dalits, the electorate was still divided into two groups. “One which has more immediate struggles is happy that it receives Modi wala genhu (as free ration distribution is referenced to in many villages),” he said. “The other group is asking fundamental questions about policy change, about the Constitutionally mandated reservation in jobs that this government is doing away with.”

In this churn, dalits seem to be looking for a new home since the BSP seems neither visible nor available. But is this new home the Samajwadi Party, which has craftily propped up cutouts of Babasaheb Ambedkar alongside that of socialist icons like Ram Manohar Lohia? And where party chief Akhilesh Yadav has also adopted the Jai Bhim greeting that was popularised by the BSP.

The dalit electorate, too, is not a homogenous unit. Among them, the Jatavs are traditional BSP supporters. Among the non-Jatavs, the Khatiks and Pasis have been drawn to the BJP. Post 2014, politics has been an attempt to consolidate the non-Jatav dalit vote. But even among the Jatavs, especially those who have achieved middle-class economic status, there is a growing attraction for the BJP. One prominent, recent example of this is former additional director general of police Asim Arun, who is now the party’s candidate from Kannauj.

“Such people find that their political aspirations cannot be fulfilled by the BSP, hence they are drawn to the BJP,” said Satendra Kumar, fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) Shimla. “The Samajwadi Party has still not been able to shed its muscular image and inspires fear among the lower OBCs and dalits. Thus, the BJP could still earn their support.”

UNEMPLOYMENT

In December 2021, the unemployment rate in the state stood at 4.9 per cent, according to data released by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Adityanath said that this rate was 17 per cent in 2016, when the Samajwadi Party was in power. Experts, however, are not sure where the state’s labour force is being absorbed. For instance, manufacturing activity—a major source of job creation—was 15.1 per cent of the state’s GDP in 2016-17 but fell to 11.7 per cent in 2020-21, according to figures from the state’s directorate of economics and statistics. Similarly, per capita income, which saw a 11.8 per cent increase in 2016-17 from the previous year, saw a fall of 0.4 per cent in 2020-21.

Yashvir Tyagi, professor at the department of economics at Lucknow University, said, “It is not clear what month the 17 per cent unemployment figure (attributed by Adityanath) refers to. The government’s claims on employment are not mirrored by the GSDP.”

The state government’s persistent showcasing of expressways as highways to economic growth is also problematic for these have long gestation periods. Be it the New Delhi-Agra expressway, built in the Mayawati regime, or the Agra-Lucknow expressway, built during Akhilesh’s rule, neither has led to hinterland development and thus created job opportunities of any scale.

Jayant Krishna, CEO of Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology, said, “The state has been unable to leverage the demographic divide. Training shops across the state are a mixed bag. Most of the jobs are being created in the informal sector. These are not aspirational.” Krishna has formerly served as the chief operating officer of the National Skill Development Corporation.

Lakshmi Shukla, a class 12 pass-out, enrolled in one of the aforementioned training shops (a centre of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Kendra) in 2019. She had basic computer operating skills, which she hoped to hone to get an “office job”. After much waiting, Tiwari found a job as a salesperson at a cosmetics shop. The hours were long, unlike the 10 to 5 workday that she had aspired to. During the first phase of the pandemic, the shop shut down, and Tiwari now works as a part-time house help. “What use is it to get a laptop when there is no chance to make a living from it,” she said.

Consequent to the return of migrants after the countrywide lockdown imposed on March 24, 2020, the state had undertaken a skill mapping exercise to provide local employment to those who had returned. Tarique Shafique, a social activist based in Sanjarpur (Azamgarh), said that the exercise was for “name sake” only. “The most common skill identified was driving and even in that not a single person in my village got a job. It was so in surrounding villages, too,” he said.

Sunil Maurya, convener of the Chhatra Yuva Rozgar Adhikar Morcha, a student body for the employment rights of the youth, said, “This government is confusing us with numbers, but it is unable to tell us where the jobs are,” he said. “The BJP had come to power promising 70 lakh jobs to the youth but those were just words.”

On December 6, 2021, a candlelight march in Lucknow organised over the irregularities of the 2019 exam to recruit 69,000 assistant teachers faced police lathi-charge, leaving over a dozen protesters injured. “This will have grave repercussions for the BJP,” said Maurya.

The state government has made big claims. At the UP Investors Summit, organised in February 2018, for instance, 1,045 MoUs with an investment intent of Rs4.28 lakh crore were signed. Of these, only 232 have achieved commercial operations and investments worth Rs57.185 crore were realised.

Sunil Vaishya, former president of the Indian Industries Association, said that while the chances of employment had increased due to government efforts, jobs were mostly generated in the national capital region. “Small and tiny industries in central and eastern Uttar Pradesh have not recovered from the loss of the pandemic,” he said. “Except for Samsung (which set up a display unit in Noida), big investments promised to the state have not come. Only one of the six defence nodes is operational. The state has a long way to go.”

Thus, while regular employment opportunities are marred by paper leaks (the most recent example being the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test), gestational periods for big investments will bring employment only in the long term, leaving the state’s youth to migrate in search of a living and disgruntled with the BJP.

The missing Muslim voter

In 2019, Shaista Ambar, president of the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board, was elated at the ban on triple talaq. “I thought to myself here is a government that had the guts to undo this unfair practice,” she said. “The Congress and the Samajwadi Party could never have done it as they wanted the vote of Muslim men. The BJP had proved to be different.”

In 2022 though, Ambar is a disappointed woman who holds that the move was purely political as in the interim the government has done nothing to address the shortcomings in the law. Instead, she said, Muslim women are now terrified of the BJP, given the rise in “hate speech, mob lynching and illegal detentions”.

Adityanath has described the 2022 election as a fight between the 80 per cent and the 20 per cent—a comment that is seen as a clear call to communal polarisation. Muslims account for over 19 per cent of the state’s population. Adityanath’s comment has been deciphered as a blatant remark on how that population is irrelevant to his election campaign even though he has denied it.

Fahimuddin, an economist whose many works include Modernisation of Muslim Education in India, said that Muslims in the state were a scared lot. “One dominant feeling is that there is the possibility of a sudden outburst of violence,” he said. The BJP, he said, acted as “only a caretaker of Hindus”. One recent example being that of the Dharm Sansad in Haridwar wherein the hate speeches had invited no arrests in Uttar Pradesh. He said that the state government had not introduced any special programmes for minorities though they had benefited from general schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana.

In July 2021, two terrorists allegedly linked to Al Qaeda-supported outfits were arrested in Lucknow. Activists believe that such arrests happen close to elections to deliberately paint Muslims in a poor light.

Javed Jung, a farmer leader from Shamli, said that the BJP was in special danger in western Uttar Pradesh, where it had tried to discredit the farmers’ movement and also drive a wedge between Jats and Muslims. The region, he said, had been traditionally hostile to the BJP. “Even at the peak of the Ram Mandir movement, it (the BJP) had been unable to enter the region’s villages,” he said. “Now, it is in an even worse position. The Muslim voter has decided that this is an election not for it to win, but to defeat the BJP.”

Rajeev Yadav, general secretary of the Rihai Manch, a body that fights for the release of those detained illegally, said that under Adityanath, dalits and Muslims were deliberately painted as threats to national security. He cited the caste violence in Shabbirpur in Saharanpur city as an example. In May 2017, soon after Adityanath became the chief minister, a clash between dalits and Thakurs had resulted in the National Security Act being invoked against the former, but not the latter.

Yadav, now an independent candidate from Nizamabad, said, “Under the guise of laws like the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversions (popularly known as the love jihad law), it is not just Muslims who are targeted but also women whose right to choice is sought to be curtailed.”

Ashma Izzat, a Lucknow-based advocate, said that the atrocities unleashed on protesters of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens was also ongoing. “Police reports were filed against the protesters and then subsequent FIRs added the Gangster Act to these charges,” she said. “Lowly educated, daily wagers were picked out so that they would not be able to avail legal help. It seems to be a targeted plan of this government to show that it has achieved high conviction rates against ‘anti-national’ elements.”

So how will the anger of the Muslim voter manifest itself? Fahimuddin said that no matter how disenchanted Muslims are they must not alienate themselves from the mainstream. “They must vote for a mainstream party, even if it is the BJP,” he said. “Aligning themselves with disruptive elements like [AIMIM president] Asaduddin Owaisi will further sideline them.”