UP Bypolls 2018: BSP-SP draw first blood, but Modi factor will make it hard for them in 2019

A week can be a long time in Indian politics. On March 3, BJP and its allies got three more states under their fold. The warm after-glow of its victory in Tripura was palpable in voice of the Prime Minister, who even mentioned it indirectly in an apolitical student’s meet. Most commentators and political parties were bracing for the next major battleground state of Karnataka.

But like a bolt from the blue, the by-elections in Hindi heartland has dealt a deep blow to BJP’s juggernaut ahead of 2019. Now, analysing bypolls can be tricky, particularly the science of using discrete data to extrapolate for a larger variable.

And more often than not, bypolls just reinforce the status-quo. But when a series of bypoll results point towards one very pronounced trend, then ignoring that would also be wrong. BJP losing two seats in UP and failing to wrest Araria seat in Bihar from RJD is a warning sign the party can’t afford to ignore.

 Most analysts thought that Phulpur would be a close contest with SP-BSP putting up a single candidate. There was hardly any murmur that CM Adityanath’s seat Gorakhpur is also a close match-up. But one could hardly blame pundits for missing that trend. Adityanath’s trajectory has been on the upswing ever since BJP’s historic UP Assembly win.

He has been roped in as party’s star speaker in Gujarat and Tripura, ramping up the attack against CM Siddaramaiah in poll-bound Karnataka. At a time, when Adityanath is slowly building up a national profile and fawning op-eds mentioning how crucial Nath voters are in scheme of things in different states are being written, UP CM lost a battle in his own backyard.

 BJP has held the seat in the last 7 Lok Sabha polls, hence it getting flipped is much more ominous than Phulpur, which the party won in 2014 wave election. In Phulpur, BJP lost by over 59 thousand votes and a SP rebel got 40 thousand odd votes. So, one can only imagine the nature of domination the SP-BSP alliance ensured in UP Deputy CM Maurya’s constituency.

 In Gorakhpur, Upendra Dutt Shukla, wasn’t the first choice of CM Adityanath.  Yet, he tried his best but failed to win the seat for the party. The vote analysis shows double effect of BSP-SP alliance and disenchantment with the ruling regime polishing off the over 3-lakh lead in both seats. In Gorakhpur, BJP’s vote share is down 5.3% and a whopping 13.6% in Phulpur.

On the other hand, SP + BSP got 38.8% in Gorakhpur in 2014 and 37.4% in Phulpur in the last poll. The SP candidate in Gorakhpur got 48.9% in 2018 and that in Phulpur received 47% this time around. So, SP-BSP alliance was merely one of the two major reasons behind BJP’s shock losses. There is a significant anti-incumbency with the BJP ruling in both state and centre. A C-Voter projection has even more alarming news for BJP. It extrapolated the trends from these bypolls and projected BJP may be down to 28 (-45) seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2019.

 Similarly, the SP-BSP combination may get 45 more seats, up from 5 in 2014. If the poll fortunes really swing so drastically in 2019, adding to BJP’s seemingly inevitable loss of seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, the path to 2019 re-election for Narendra Modi would be much steeper.

However, these kinds of projections or even analysis of bypolls overlook two crucial aspects- turnout of voters and the all-encompassing Modi factor. The voter turnout in UP byelection was abysmally low.

Be it owing to voter fatigue or a grouse with the Adityanath government, many core BJP voters didn’t come out to vote, which accounts for the negative swing the party suffered. This can be managed when Modi campaigns, as it automatically recharges batteries of the ground-level workers who would do their best to mobilize the voters.

 Also, there have been reports of disillusionment with the Adityanath government among the non- Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. The rainbow coalition of larger Hindu alliance which Amit Shah managed to forge in the Assembly polls was ruptured in Phulpur and Gorakhpur. Hence Nishad votes heavily went to SP in Gorakhpur.

Closer to elections, an aggressive rhetoric and ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ PM Modi’s presence can offset the phenomenon to this extent, where the regional parties are looking to aggressively protect their caste voters. But that only reinforces the theory, that PM Modi still remains the most acceptable electoral face of BJP.

He appeals to the swing voters too which a hardline political figure doesn’t. There lies the limitation of Adityanath brand of politics currently. Another crucial factor that works for BJP is that the alliance between SP and BSP and potentially of Congress - the UP Mahagatbandhan wouldn’t be smooth.

There are many places in UP where SP and BSP are evenly matched-especially in pockets of Western and Central part. There would be hectic parleys for ticket and very real possibility of a lot of rebel candidates contesting the polls.

 Also, BSP voters are a much-committed lot who would vote for whichever party Behenji asks them to. The same can’t be said about SP and Congress voters.

There is an obvious casteist element there, which would make clean transfer of votes to BSP’s kitty a very uphill proposition. Thus, the self-contradictions are pretty high for a grand alliance to work, though merely the instincts for political survival might make it a working option for the leaders.

In Bihar’s Araria, RJD won in a seat with sizeable Muslim population against BJP. The JD(U) couldn’t manage to transfer its minority votes to BJP. Sushil Kumar Modi on Twitter hinted at a minority mobilsation against the BJP, but there is no reason to believe that won’t happen a year later. Nitish Kumar jumped sides to be in the right side of political dispensation, pun intended but if that means desertion of his Muslim vote-bank, he may be willing to rethink his options again. The BJP has won only two Lok Sabha bypolls in four years, now down to 272 from 282 in 2014.

On the other hand, the polity of this country has become increasingly saffron with BJP winning one state after another. In bypolls it is down almost 10% of the votes from 2014, but it is just doing enough to win key battle ground states in Assembly elections.

The BJP can again lift its performance in 2019, but it will need some hard-hitting slog-over batting from Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. But as the UP shocker showed, 2019 is by no means a foregone conclusion.

How well the Opposition ‘unites’, and whether BJP can eliminate self-goals will decide the fate of the next general election.