Opposition still licks wounds, BJP has cracks within

A telling freezeframe came at a press conference that Yadav held in Lucknow to mark six months of the Yogi Adityanath government, where he suggested that the election the BJP won was stolen from him: “Why ask them (BJP) about vikas (development)? These are not their issues. Today, mobile and WhatsApp works like opium. It will happen again when election comes. Ham sab uss taraf dekhenge, vote pad jayega (while we are distracted, the votes will be cast one way)”.

Its flailing does little to mask its predicament: In the Yogi regime, the SP is not just circumscribed by the BJP’s success, but also hamstrung by its own failures.

If it seems unable to confront the Yogi Adityanath government on its aggressive Hindutva, it is also because of the still palpable backlash against its own version of secularism.

As many even among the Muslims admit, the SP’s secularism has been, all too often, an impoverished notion — it did not enable or empower the Muslims while agitating and alienating the Hindus.

SP politics worked to keep the discussion in the minority community pegged to issues of safety and security. For the rest, the party cultivated a minority vote bank more by extending special protections and concessions, less by assuring dignity and equality of opportunity.

To the Muslims, the SP promise was a meagre one. For a significant section of the Hindu majority, however, it lent weight to the BJP’s charge of minority “appeasement”. “On one side sits Sita, on the other Nayeema. Nayeema gets the (benefit of) Kanya Dhan Yojana, cycle, scholarship, 20 per cent reservation in all government schemes, money for the kabristan (graveyard), police favouritism” — Kapil Dev Agarwal, BJP MLA, Muzaffarnagar, draws a picture. The image denies the reality of Muslim backwardness on all social and economic indicators, but by all accounts, it played a key role in the BJP’s conquest of UP.

In the Yogi regime, the SP is not just circumscribed by the BJP’s success, but also hamstrung by its own failures.

Add to that the unending saga of war, sprinkled with the occasional truce, in the Family Yadav, and it is clear why the SP is finding it difficult to get off the backfoot in the state it lost to the BJP.

While the SP searches for the political language to take on a formidable opponent, the BSP is missing from the streets — as it typically is in between elections. In the eight months of the Yogi government, the whir of the formidable party machine, which prepares for polls so meticulously, is barely noticeable among the people, on issues of governance.

The Congress, which partnered the SP in the last elections — to little avail — continues to suffer, as a party veteran in Muzaffarnagar who does not wish to be named puts it, from a recurring syndrome: In which “parikrama” scores over “parakram” (genuflection trumps hard work) and there is a lack of “sameeksha” (follow-up).

From the khat sabhas of Rahul Gandhi across the state in September-October 2016, to the farmers’ dharna for sugarcane payments that local Congressmen joined last month in Muzaffarnagar, there is little sign of a party consolidating its sporadic political mobilisations. As a consequence, it always seems to start from the beginning.

“Toofan aaya tha, sab beh gaya, (a storm swept everything before it)”, says Ram Mehar Rathi, advocate, also in Muzaffarnagar. Rathi is a member of the state executive of the Ajit Singh led-RLD, which was comprehensively trounced by the BJP in its bastion of western UP.

Discontent is building against the Yogi government, he says, on bijli-sadak-paani, law and order, demonetisation and GST. But the BJP’s opponents cannot hope to capitalise on it until they join hands, form an alliance: “The Opposition is demoralised. They lost in 2014 and again in 2017. Now, they will have to unite to be successful in challenging the BJP”.

By all accounts, then, the BJP government in UP does not face a problem from across the aisle — so far. In fact, the toughest questions in these eight months have been asked not by the SP, BSP, or Congress but by the young women and men on the campus of the Kashi Hindu Vishwavidyalaya (BHU) in the prime minister’s constituency.

Here, in September, an incident of molestation of a female student, and the university’s mishandling and victim-blaming, sparked protests that were as lively as they were unorganised. For the angry students, whose voice, for a few days, carried well beyond Benaras, the issue was not just safety or security, or the discriminatory university policies for male and female students.

The brutal university crackdown on the protests had triggered larger questions, some addressed to Lucknow’s ruling party: “Are we terrorists?” “What is the meaning of national and anti-national?” “Why are permissions for organising religious events on campus so easy and so difficult for seminars and debates?”

On the steps of Varanasi’s iconic Assi Ghat, an adda or hub of lost and found arguments, Aditi Maurya, an M.Com (final) student, asks: “Why is tradition quoted to us, not what is wrong or right? Is the CCTV camera going to be the new totem of development?”

The campus has fallen silent. The people are giving Yogi a chance and Modi the benefit of doubt in UP. But for the Yogi-BJP, at least two challenges may have become more apparent within.

One, for all its tough talk, it is a government headed by a chief minister whose grip over the administrative challenge is still a question mark, even among BJP supporters. “Ichcha toh hai, par prashasanik akshamta hai (there is a will, but not the administrative way)”, says Budhisagar Tiwari, a retired civil servant in Varanasi. Most often, the faltering of his promise to make UP’s roads “gaddha-mukt” or pothole-free by June is held up as proof of Yogi’s administrative naivete.

While many welcome the fact that there is less evidence of political interference in the thana, seen to be heavily politicised in the SP regime, the compliment is double-edged. In the Yogi regime, they say, ministers and MLAs seem far more powerless.

Two, while Chief Minister Yogi has managed to keep his private army, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, in suspended animation for now, the calm is uneasy and simmering.

The Vahini is a formless force with no fixed address, heavily dependent on Brand Yogi — in Gorakhpur, its place of birth, it operates from within the premises of the temple establishment headed by Yogi; in neighbouring Azamgarh, from the homes of its members, holding its monthly meetings in a Ganesh temple in the city.

In the immediate aftermath of Yogi becoming chief minister, the Vahini was seen to run amok. After that first eruption, however, Yogi has ordered restraint, Vahini membership has been suspended, and even the wearing of saffron gamchas (scarves) forbidden.

“Members of other parties tried to use our saffron scarves to cover their crimes, and we got the blame. So we told our people to hold back, till we identify those bad elements”, says Vahini General Secretary P.K. Mall. The Vahini’s priorities have changed, he says. “Earlier we did aandolan (agitation). Now, we only report wrongdoing”.

In Azamgarh, Virender Singh, zilla prabhari, HYV, explains the Vahini’s functioning: If both sides are Hindu, it counsels compromise, “we only fight it out if it is Hindu vs non-Hindu”. He spells out the spectre that drives the militant outfit: “In 2050, if you come here, there will only be a Rahman bhai, you will not find Virender Singh”.

With its “Maharaj ji” (Yogi) as chief minister, the Vahini, restrained for now, is seething with a larger ambition: “It is because of the Vahini that the BJP had to concede chief ministership to Maharaj ji. We can close down the district, if ordered to, and the BJP knows this. Now our effort will be to bring Yogi back as CM of the Vahini. In future, we should not even need the BJP”, says Singh.