CM Yogi Roadshow, One Day Before Final Countdown

One day before the election campaign ends in Gorakhpur, Yogi Adityanath’s roadshow is about to begin from Town Hall in the heart of the city, from where he is also the candidate. The Chief Minister is yet to arrive, saffron balloons bob under a hot sun, exhortations go up from a makeshift stage: “Sanatan dharm ko bachana hai toh Yogi-Modi ko lana hai (Yogi and Modi must return to power if Hinduism has to be saved)”.

Slogans vie with snatches of song: “Hindu hain hum, bas Ram ki baat karein (We are Hindus, talk only of Ram)… Sabko pension aur shauchalaya (pension and toilets for all)… Yeh dharm yudh hai (this is a religious war) … Mathura Vrindavan abhi baaki hai (Mathura and Vrindavan are yet to come)… Jai Shri Ram… Har Har Mahadev”.

“Aayenge phir Yogi hi (it will only be Yogi)” is the chorus on loudspeakers and emblazoned on t-shirts of young men who push their way through the throng. The BJP’s Yuva Morcha has turned out in strength, so has its Mahila Morcha. A rath-like vehicle is set to accompany the CM’s motorcade, and there is a strong police presence.

As Yogi’s cavalcade rolls up to Townhall, the song and slogan and blowing of conch shells give way to the rising, ringing chant of Sanskrit shlokas by Brahmin priests.

Yogi didn’t make a speech as his roadshow started from Townhall that day. He didn’t need to. The spectacle was the message.

It spoke of a personality cult, or two, a twinning actually. If the BJP won the last election riding on the Modi leher or wave in UP, this election has seen the makings of the cult of Yogi. He is pitching himself as the protector and promoter of a Hindutva that is more in-your-face than it has ever been, cum “Bulldozer Baba”, whose favoured instrument to rule is the police.

In UP 2022, “Yogi-Modi” or “Modi-Yogi”, backed by the BJP organisation, use of high tech and harnessing of schemes, resources and symbols of state, is the formidable combination to defeat.

Incidentally, the only other leader mentioned in the slogans on that Gorakhpur afternoon was Rajnath Singh. He is a former UP chief minister, former BJP president, and current Union defence minister. But it doesn’t take great skills at reading political code to see why he alone was invoked alongside Modi-Yogi. Singh is a Thakur. As much as it seeks to label its political opponent as casteist, and for all that the label mostly sticks, caste is a critical component of the BJP’s own arsenal and pitch.

Two days after the Yogi roadshow in Gorakhpur, Akhilesh Yadav shared the stage with his allies — and much more prominently, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in Varanasi.

Didi’s awkward Hindi seemed not to come in the way of her forceful attack on Yogi-Modi. She described the UP government’s “anti-Romeo squads” as anti-young and called attention to the invisibilisation of Siya or Sita in the BJP slogan “Jai Shri Ram”. She spoke of migrants abandoned by BJP governments during the pandemic-induced lockdown, and about the stranded students in Ukraine. She recited a Sanskrit mantra, one arm dramatically held aloft, and several lines of “ai mere watan ke logo”, threw a large white football into the crowd and her now-trademark challenge: “Khela hoga, hoga na (the game is on, isn’t it?”

Mamata’s presence on his stage was a symbolic force-multiplier for the main challenger of Modi-Yogi: The Modi-BJP can be defeated, it said, it happened in West Bengal. But if Akhilesh Yadav seemed in danger of being overshadowed in Varanasi — his own pitch seemed decidedly less fiery than Mamata’s, as he asked the crowd, “aap log naraaz ho ke nahin BJP se, bhool toh nahin jaaoge, maaf toh nahin kar doge (you are angry with the BJP, are you not, you won’t forget or forgive, will you)?” — it may not have been entirely incidental.

Despite the fact that the Akhilesh-led SP enjoyed five years in power with a wide mandate, 2012 to 2017, followed by five years as the BJP government’s main Opposition, he is painted by his opponents as someone who is still not entirely in charge, and seen even by supporters as a work in progress.

Outside its core and committed base, Akhilesh is still not free of the spectres attached to memories of SP rule — of family strife, “goonda raj (lumpenism)”, undue favours to Yadavs and Muslims, and of the state ceding critical space to local dons and chieftains.

In this election, the SP’s appeal is an assortment, a sum of many parts which remain local and separate, with no overriding appeal of persona, no synced themes — unlike the Yogi-Modi choreography and phalanx of Suraksha-Hindutva-Scheme.

To begin with, in many places, as in Akhilesh’s own Lok Sabha constituency and old party bastion of Azamgarh — the SP’s Durga Prasad Yadav has been MLA here for a staggering eight consecutive terms — it rests on its traditional M-Y formula.

There is resentment about Akhilesh’s prolonged absences in Azamgarh — posters were put up earlier in the city about the “lapataa sansad (missing MP)” and many here draw comparisons with Modi’s frequent visits to neighbouring Varanasi. Yet, says Shah Abid, who is on the management committee of the city’s prestigious Shibli National College, “The M-Y combination is functional here, it delivers. If you ask, 90 out of 100 people in the city will predict an SP sweep.”

Even in its bastion, however, the SP recognises that it needs to woo the non-core vote to win — the smaller, more scattered non-Yadav backward castes that have traditionally resented Yadav dominance and that played a big role in swinging the 2017 election for the Modi-BJP.

In Azamgarh, Dinesh Kumar Yadav, SP state secretary, who looks after the pichhda prakoshth (backward caste cell), says: “This time, we have given almost 40 per cent bhaagidaari to the Rajbhar, Chauhan, Maurya, Nishad, Prajapati, Jaiswal. It used to be 25 to 30 per cent.” And Nafees Ahmed, sitting SP MLA Gopalpur, says: “Our focus has always been sarv samaj (the whole of society), but it has become bigger. Iss baar hamne jodne ka kaam kiya hai, chhodne ka nahin (we have tried to include this time, not exclude).”

A strategic focus on non-Yadav OBCs shows in the SP’s ticket distribution, and in its alliances with parties like the Apna Dal (K) and Om Prakash Rajbhar’s SBSP. On the ground, it shows mixed results.

In the Kurmi mohalla of village Atwai, district Ambedkar Nagar, a group of voters talks of naukri-padhai-saand (joblessness, setback to education, and marauding cattle). But as the conversation goes on, it becomes clear that the shift of Lalji Verma, a prominent Kurmi leader from these parts, from the BSP to the SP, is also a factor. Verma is one of the influential OBC leaders in this erstwhile BSP stronghold who switched sides to the SP on poll-eve.

But in the Rajbhar locality at Khwaja Jahanpur of Mau, Poojan, a power loom worker, says: “The SBSP may go wherever it sees fit. This time it is with the SP, but last time it was with the BJP. We can’t follow it around just because we are Rajbhars.”

If the Yadav voter seems to be rallying behind the SP, and the non-Yadav backward caste voter looks less single-minded, support for the SP in the Muslim mohalla is tinged with helplessness, cynicism or resignation.

In Manikpur village in Mau, Sheikh Hisamuddin, a social worker, says: “They (Yogi-Modi) say sabka saath sabka vikas, but their heart is not in it… When they talk of putting down the mafia, they only take Muslim names. What about Raja Bhaiyya, Dhananjay Singh, Tribhuvan Singh? Gundon ki biradari nahin hoti (the lumpen have no religion).” And Mohammad Mobin Chaudhary, a farmer, says: “Sahme sahme se rahte hain (we are anxious and subdued)… From Pehlu Khan to Tabrez Ansari and Mohammed Akhlaq, there was no justice for the lynchings… Now they have raised the hijab controversy.”

In Kopaganj town of Mau, businessman Abdul Azeem Khan remembers an older SP: “Mulayam Singh’s party would do dharna pradarshan (demonstrations), go to jail. Akhilesh’s party did not come forward on CAA-NRC.”

In Sanjarpur village in district Azamgarh, Rafat Ahmed, who works in Saudi Arabia, and is back home since the lockdown, says: “Wherever and whenever there is an issue that affects us, Akhilesh goes silent…”

Several young men who were arrested after the Batla House encounter in the national capital in 2008 belonged to Sanjarpur, and the village is still fighting the taint. “The whole village is placed in the dock… If politics does not speak for us, we must speak for ourselves. That is why many more children in Sanjarpur are studying now, and going out for higher education to Aligarh and Delhi.”

In this election, then, the SP’s challenge is made of this — it counts on discontents that cleave to the ground, most of all berozgari or unemployment, and mehengai or price rise, which makes them powerful but also harnesses them to other untidy ground-level realities, loyalties, cleavages, shifts. On the other side, Modi-Yogi have appropriated the planks of “dharm” and “desh”, religion and country, that are able to, when required, lift their campaign clear off the ground.

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