Opinion/Uttar Pradesh : Modi refedineselectoral idiom

The change in electoral discourse started in 2014 after a positive campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, focused on development and governance and changed the grammar of political campaign giving BJP a historical mandate

Shantanu Gupta
With 22 crore strong human resource force, only five countries in the world can match Uttar Pradesh in population. With 80 Lok Sabha seats and history of sending maximum number of Prime Ministers to New Delhi, UP’s electoral dynamics is a feast for politicians and election pundits. Results for fiercely faught 2017 UP Assembly elections are out. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies have swept the state of Uttar Pradesh with 325 seats out of 403 seats in the state Assembly, clinching almost 42 per cent of the vote share.

Opinion/Uttar Pradesh: Even MuslimsembracedBJP’s agenda

 Barring Chanakya, none of the exit poles came close to this verdict. Most of the political pundits and psephologists, look clueless to provide a sensible theory behind this victory. All of them are trained to theorise political campaigns and victories based on some arithmetic of caste, religion, age, gender and region. The voting pattern, defied all such
traditional patterns. BJP’s Brijesh Singh, won the Deoband seat, which is known for its famous Darul Ulum, Islamic school. Congress dominated, Amethi seat was won by BJP’s Garima Singh . This undefined wave has successfully stormed Amethi and Rae Bareli, long-time
bastions of the Nehru-Gandhi family, with the Congress  being routed in eight of the 10 Assembly seats there.
The Yadav family bahu, Aparna Yadav lost her seat from Lucknow. Bundelkhand region, dominated by Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has been wiped out by the BJP. Political Pundits said, Jats of west of UP are angry with BJP, because of the reservation issue of Haryana, but they seemed to have voted for BJP in the  west. Some others are saying it’s Hindu consolidation, some saying Mayawati lost money in demonetisation and was not able  to campaign properly, leaders of SP started murmuring that alliance with Congress has cost them the humiliating defeat.
The  change in electoral discourse started in 2014. Apart from a historically decisive mandate for BJP-led coalition, the positive campaign of Narendra Modi, focused on development and governance, changed the grammar of political
campaigning in India forever. Adding to this Anna Hazare’s and Baba Ramdev’s movements sharpened the discourse
of anti-corruption in the country. First time someone boldly attempted to
communicate the language of aspiration versus the language of victimisation which was the trend of electoral
messaging till then. So much so that Modi’s doctrine of ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’, ‘Per Drop More Crop’ , ‘Government has No Business to be in Business’, ‘Tourism Unites, Terrorism Divides’ and 14 such themes took the shape of ‘Moditva’ compilation, which was more talked about than the party’s official manifesto.
This phenomena has made it compulsory for all political parties battling in the Kurukshetra of Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections 2017, to have a component of development and aspirations in their electoral syllabus. Modi-led BJP came up with a very comprehensive strategy for  Uttar Pradesh, in the form of ‘Lok Kalyan Sankalp Patra’. The SP had to devise a family dispute, to help Akhilesh come out as a clean leader, with ‘Kam Bolta Hai’ punch line. Even Congress has harped on the ‘27 Saal UP Behal’ campaign to point out the failures of previous governments. Though their electoral opportunism, made them shake hands with SP, which they were opposing vehemently till as late as January 2017. Irony of fate laughed loudly during the joint road show of Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav, when they were both captured entangled in wires, while chanting ‘Kam Bolta Hai’. Far from all these narratives, Mayawati still seemed to don her old strategy of social engineering, caste calculations and securing Dalit-Brahmin & Dalit-Muslim equations. Apart from reminding people of her marginally better law and  order record, she did not seem to have much to offer in her speeches.
So it’s clear that the rules of electoral battle  have been altered by the Prime Minister. He himself looks very
confident in the new rules, as he has a long three-term experience of
governance and bringing real change in the state of Gujarat, specially in ease of doing business, 24X7 power supply and  world- class public infrastructure. First time, after a long gap, some Prime Minister is able to communicate with the people, able to convince them to keep India clean, able to convince people to give up their subsidies, able to convince people to stand up in queues to kill the menace of unaccounted money. For people of Uttar Pradesh, the vocabulary of development is rather new. Akhilesh, Mayawati and  Rahul attempted this new vocabulary but failed as their limping track records did not walk the talk.
(The writer is founder of a leading youth based organisation Yuva Foundation and an author of Vikas ki Pratiksha mein in Hindi)