UP Elections : Four-way battle royal ahead,Indian Politics, News Analysis, India News Online

Uttar Pradesh is set to have multi-cornered contests in the crucial Assembly elections spread over seven phases which start early next month. While the two main contenders for power in the state - Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party will be virtually fighting on their own, the BJP and the Congress are trying to forge alliances with smaller parties in a bid to maintain their relevance at the national level.

Both the BJP and the Congress realise that the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections have the potential of being the trend-setters for the Lok Sabha elections due in 2009. The BJP is trying to copy the Congress strategy adopted during the last Lok Sabha elections of 2004 of having social and political alliances in place at the state and regional level. The Congress had ignored this strategy during the last two and a half years and had to pay the price, losing the Assembly elections in Punjab and Uttarakhand. Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley in a recent newspaper interview admitted that the days of tall majority of 300 to 400 seats in the Lok Sabha are over. He said whoever is able to cross 150 is the new winner. According to Jaitley, there is no longer a national poll in India. “Indian national poll is the net aggregate of some 28 different state votes now. The winner in the next poll will be the one who has the best social and political alliances in place,” he said.

Both BJP and Congress trying hard for alliances

With the realisation that on their own they may not be able to make a dent in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, both the BJP and the Congress are going all out to forge alliances with smaller parties. The BJP is said to be prepared to give away upto 55 seats to the Janata Dal (United) and the Apna Dal in the Uttar Pradesh poll. The JD(U) has also read the writing on the wall and given up the idea of having nothing to do with the BJP in the elections starting next month. The BJP and NDA victories in Punjab and Uttarakhand resulted in the JDU top leaders Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar coming round to having an alliance with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh to consolidate the NDA vote, as they put it.

Leaders of the BJP, JD(U) and Apna Dal had a meeting in New Delhi last week where discussions took place on seat-to-seat allocation.

The BJP was represented by Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, central party coordinator for seat sharing in the State; the JD(U) by its president Sharad Yadav and the Apna Dal by its chief Sone Lal Patel.

Apparently several hours of discussions took place between Naqvi and Patel on Friday too and a couple of days earlier there was a meeting between BJP president Rajnath Singh and Patel. It seems the BJP may be prepared to part with 12-15 seats for the JD (U) and 35-40 seats for the Apna Dal. There are more than 403 seats in the Assembly.

Apparently, there was some resistance from the State-level leaders to going with the Apna Dal. However, during his recent visit to Lucknow, Rajnath Singh convinced them that the alliance would help the BJP. Recently, Venkaiah Naidu, Naqvi and Bal Apte were also in Lucknow to “persuade” the State leaders to accept the tie-up with the Apna Dal.

The central leadership seems to be of the view that the alliance could attract sizable sections of the “other backward castes,” with the Kurmi leader Patel and the Lodh leader Kalyan Singh (former BJP Chief Minister) in it. One senior BJP politician said this could add as much as four per cent to the BJP’s support base. In the 2002 Assembly elections, Kalyan Singh was not with the BJP (he had then floated a separate outfit and tied up with the Samajwadi Party).

Congress approach

Shaky over the idea of going to the hustings on its own strength, the Congress is actively looking at the alliance route to make its way through the rough and tumble of UP polls. In order to ensure a significantly large electoral space for itself, it is hunting for viable, like-minded smaller parties to take on its fierce adversary, the ruling Samajwadi Party, and arch opponent, the BJP. BSP chief Mayawati is already said to have ruled out any pre-poll alliance.

There are indications that the Congress might join hands with smaller parties or groups like former Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s Jan Morcha, Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) to form a UP coalition which is being dubbed as the “Fourth Front”. Parleys are on among these allies as well as well within the Congress over the proposed alliance. Jan Morcha president Raj Babbar met Sonia Gandhi and then her son and UP MP, Rahul Gandhi, to discuss the issue last week. RLD chief Ajit Singh is also reported to have called on Sonia Gandhi.

Having got down to the nitty gritty of building alliances in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress is now faced with the tough task of accommodating the demands of the parties with whom it is having a dialogue.

While a pact with the Jan Morcha appears to be a certainty as it is not asking for a very large share of seats but an alliance with the RLD is proving to be far more difficult as Ajit Singh has sought at least 100 seats, a demand which the Congress is not willing to concede. Similarly, the Bharatiya Samaj Party, which has a following among the Rajbhars, is learnt to have made unreasonable demands. In addition, Apna Dal leader Sone Lal having a substantial base among the Kurmis is bargaining with both the NDA as well as the Congress.

Left parties divided

The CPI(M) and the CPI, the two main Left parties in the State are divided on their approach to the elections and will be fighting separately. While the CPI says that it will contest 17 seats in alliance with the Jan Morcha and other parties, the CPI(M) has decided to contest 16 seats on its own. The two parties, however, will not contest against each other. The CPI declared that it considers the Bahujan Samaj Party to be a secular outfit and will strive to defeat the Samajwadi Party in the coming Assembly elections. The CPI(M) on the other hand has said that it does not consider the BSP to be secular because it suspects that the party will join hands with the BJP after the polls. The CPI(M) said that it will not do anything to weaken the Samajwadi Party because that will strengthen what it called the communal BJP.

Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh has said that his party may support the CPI(M) in four or five seats.

BJP going all out to win UP

Trying to make the Uttar Pradesh elections as a stepping stone to power at the Centre, the BJP is going all out to put up a better performance in the Assembly elections. The party has decided to field almost all front-ranking second generation leaders to manage the coming elections in the state. While former BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu has been made incharge of poll-bound Uttar Pradesh to steer the party’s election machinery, the state has been carved into several divisions and a top central leader assigned the task of overseeing the party’s preparations in each division.

While Venkaiah Naidu will have his base in the state capital Lucknow, BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley has been made incharge of western Uttar Pradesh with his base camp at Meerut. Another party general secretary Ananth Kumar has been entrusted the task of looking after the party’s campaign in eastern Uttar Pradesh with his headquarters at Varanasi. Former Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde will oversee the preparations in central UP and will be based at Kanpur. Another party leader Om Mathur will operate out of Agra. BJP vice president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi has been made incharge of coordination and publicity for the election campaign and will be based in Lucknow.

The BJP has named party vice president Kalyan Singh as its chief-ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh. He has been appointed the chairman of the Election Campaign Committee.

The RSS and its various offshoots have been fully involved in the BJP election campaign. A number of RSS pracharakas and ABVP activists have fanned out in different parts of the state to help in the election campaign at the grassroots level.

Reflecting the Hindutva line of the BJP, the party has decided to utilise Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as one of its star campaigners during the elections. Former Prime Minister Vajpayee and senior leaders L.K. Advani and Rajnath Singh would also be campaigning extensively.

Reflecting the renewed emphasis on Hindutva, party president Rajnath Singh at a meeting in New Delhi on March 7 urged the Muslims to take the initiative in helping build a Ram temple on the disputed site at Ayodhya. Addressing the party’s minority morcha, he reiterated the BJP’s position on the temple issue saying that it must be built at the place where Lord Rama was born. Rajnath Singh blamed the Congress for poor economic and educational condition of the Muslim community. He said the BJP was opposed to the recommendations of the Sachar Committee as such moves would create a divide in society.

Addressing another party function in New Delhi on March 7, former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and party president Rajnath Singh said the Congress has lost the trust of the people who want a change. They said the people are looking towards the BJP with expectation and expressed confidence that the party will return to power at the Centre in 2009.

Alliances order of the day : Arjun Singh

Virtually accepting that the Congress on its own cannot put up a strong show in Uttar Pradesh, senior leader and Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh has said that the party should go in for alliances in the state as it was the “order of the day.”

Making an appearance in public after a gap of two-and-a-half months, during which he was recovering from illness, Arjun Singh termed the Congress show in the recent elections in Punjab and Uttarakhand as “disappointing.” Asked by mediapersons about the reasons, he said, “It is price rise”, and made an oblique reference to party indiscipline as he added that “there were other reasons also which have been enumerated by Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

On whether the price rise would cast its shadow in UP also, he said : “I hope not”. He felt the party will put up a “very good show” in the state.

The veteran Congress leader said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had taken several measures to contain inflation, and “time should be given for those initiatives to bear fruit.”

Party president Sonia Gandhi and Amethi MP Rahul Gandhi are having meetings to discuss three issues : candidate selection, mobilisation strategies and alliances. Ashok Gehlot, the general secretary for Uttar Pradesh, and Salman Khurshid, the state party chief, were present at the meetings. The meetings also took stock of alliances in Uttar Pradesh. The leaders noted how quick the BJP was to grab Apna Dal, a caste-based party of Kurmis which has a base in the eastern districts even as the Congress was still drawing up the pluses and minuses of potential partners.

“At any time, the Apna Dal has a vote share of 4 or 5 per cent,” a party functionary conceded.

On rallying workers, the only plan Rahul unveiled was to draft 100 young workers from across the country. They have been asked to work in 100 constituencies where the Congress came a cropper in the last elections and ensure it polls at least 10,000 votes this time.

Mulayam’s campaign against CBI probe

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav continued his campaign last week against the CBI probe ordered by the Supreme Court to find out if he has assets disproportionate to his income. He met President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee with the complaint that the Congress was targeting him and his family members.

Yadav, accompanied by SP general secretary Amar Singh, alleged that the case was part of the Congress game to oust him before the election and gave an audio CD purportedly containing a conversation between petitioner Vishwanath Chaturvedi and a journalist. Singh had given the CD to CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat on Monday, March. 5.

The CPI(M) had opposed the Congress moves to impose President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh, giving the SP enough reason to see the Marxist party as a trusted ally. What the SP offered in exchange for the CPI(M)’s stand on Article 356 was to support the party’s presidential candidate. While the CPI(M) has been silent on the issue, Singh declared his party’s support for Somanth Chatterjee.

At the meeting with the Speaker, the SP leaders said the government was framing them and sought the Chair’s protection for MPs. Amar Singh who alleged that the investigation against Mulayam Singh and his family members is being conducted under directions from the Congress president, said that his party has no plans to approach the court. The CBI will be taking orders from Suresh Pachori Minister of State for Personnel and Home Minister Shivraj Patil. We are ready for a probe by a sitting Supreme Court judge. “We do not want Pachori or Sonia Gandhi’s CBI to investigate the allegations,” Singh said.

On March 7, the Samajwadi Party accused the Congress of hatching a political conspiracy against its leader. It said it was ready to face an inquiry by a Parliamentary Committee or a judge into allegations that UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and his family have assets disproportionate to their known sources of income.

Akhilesh Yadav, son of the Chief Minister, who spoke after the matter was raised in the Lok Sabha by SP leader Ram Gopal Yadav, sought protection from Speaker Somnath Chantterjee, claiming that he was being “framed” despite regularly filing income tax returns.

“All details of my movable and immovable property are before the Election Commission,” he said. The Supreme Court had, on a public interest litigation, which alleged that Yadav and his family possessed assets disproportionate to their known sources of income ordered a preliminary enquiry by the CBI.

Speaking at an election rally at Baghpat on March 8, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh said that he and his Samajwadi Party respected the Supreme court directive, but will not cooperate with the CBI in the disproportionate assets case. Mulayam Singh said he is willing to go to jail, but will not give any statement to the CBI. The Chief Minister dubbed the CBI as a tool in Congress hands.

Launching his party’s election campaign from Baghpat, the Chief Minister lashed out at Rashtriya Lok Dal president and one-time ally, Ajit Singh for his failure to follow the coalition dharma

The Chief Minister said the Congress was more interested in toppling his Government than checking the BJP’s inroads, adding that the Congress obsession had manifested itself in the party’s defeat at the hands of the BJP in Uttarakhand and Punjab.

The BJP has said that Mulayam Singh Yadav is politicising the issue of the CBI probe into his disproportionate assets case. Former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu said in Lucknow on March 7 that the Samajwadi Party had launched a political campaign to settle a legal issue.

In the meantime, the CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry against Mulayam Singh and some of his family members to probe allegations that they acquired assets disproportionate to their known sources of income. A CBI official said the agency would now go through all the documents filed along with the PIL in the court.

BJP criticises Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan

On Friday, March 9, BJP activists in Varanasi burnt posters and an effigy of Bollywood Star Amitabh Bachchan for what they called a ‘veiled’ campaign for the Samajwadi Party through advertisements beamed on TV channels ahead of polls in the State. The activists gathered on the bank of the Ganga and shouted slogans against Bachchan for defending the law and order situation in the state under Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The Election Commission has barred the Union Rural Development Ministry from introducing the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 15 new district in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh. The Commission has also asked the State Government to provide a list of persons with criminal background who have been given security cover.

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