New Delhi: It’s INDIA 1, NDA 0 in Uttar Pradesh.
Despite using all its might and resources, deploying Hindutva as well as caste calculations, the Bharatiya Janata Party has lost the Ghosi assembly by-poll election in the state with the Samajwadi Party winning. This is not only a shot in the arm for the INDIA bloc of Opposition parties, and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav in particular, but a source of major embarrassment for chief minister Adityanath ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
It was a straight contest between the INDIA bloc and the NDA. The Congress did not field a nominee but supported the SP candidate. The Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party did not contest the by-poll, maintaining its position of officially staying away from both NDA and INDIA.
“Ghosi did not make victorious the candidate of the SP but of the INDIA alliance, and this is also going to be the result in the future,” Akhilesh Yadav said in a congratulatory note for voters of Ghosi. “This is a victory of positive politics and the defeat of communal, negative politics.”
Yadav said the Ghosi by-poll result reflected the success of the party’s new formula against the BJP. “Team INDIA hai, aur PDA (Pichda Dalit Alpsankhyak) rajneeti,” he said.
The SP’s veteran leader Sudhakar Singh, a two-time former MLA, has defeated Dara Singh Chauhan of the BJP by 42,759 votes in Ghosi. According to the Election Commission of India, after 33 rounds, Singh secured 1.24 lakh votes, 57.19%, while Chauhan got 81,668 votes (37.54%).
Adityanath and his deputies Maurya and Pathak are yet to react to the defeat.
The BJP deputed its state president Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary to face the media.
“From a political point of view the result was not one we expected,’ said Chaudhary. He, however, asked if the opposition would still question the credibility of EVMs and government institutions.
“Will the opposition question the EVMs after this result? Will they question government machinery, constitutional institutions and the Election Commission of India?” asked Chaudhary.
Why the by-polls mattered
The by-poll was held after Chauhan, who was the sitting SP MLA, resigned from his seat and party in July and returned to the BJP. With the return of OBC leaders Chauhan and Om Prakash Rajbhar, president of the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, to its fold after a short stint with the SP, the BJP had received a huge boost as it prepared for the general elections. However, the defeat in Ghosi, where not just Rajbhar but over a dozen ministers in the Adityanath cabinet including the chief minister himself extensively campaigned for Chauhan, has put the BJP in an awkward position.
Adityanath also played the Hindutva card openly while campaigning for the by-poll in Ghosi, which is located in Mau district of Purvanchal, abutting Azamgarh. Addressing a rally in Ghosi on September 2, Adityanath reminded voters of the firing on ‘karsevaks’ in Ayodhya ordered by the then Mulayam Singh government in 1990. Adityanath also linked the Ghosi by-poll to the 2005 Mau communal violence. SP was in power in the state then.
“That the Ghosi by-poll is important would be understood by those who closely felt the 2005 riots in Mau. Under the then SP government, rioters and mafia, brandishing weapons openly, were killing Yadavs in some places and Dalits in others. The Congress government ruling at the Centre then did not say anything and the SP government in the state could not do anything,” said Adityanath. The chief minister also reminded voters how he reached Mau from Gorakhpur to intervene. “I was the MP of Gorakhpur then. And to fight these rioters, I came down from Gorakhpur,” he said, generating loud applause from the crowd.
Though Adityanath did not name jailed former MLA Mukhtar Ansari, who has faced the biggest brunt of the Gangsters Act under the BJP government, he made an unmistakable reference to him.
“The mafia who were earlier brandishing weapons, today can be seen on a wheelchair begging for their lives,” he said. Ansari had been accused of instigating the Mau riots. His son Abbas Ansari had stood second in Ghosi in 2017, falling short of the BJP’s Fagu Chauhan by a thin margin.
Sudhakar Singh, who won from Ghosi in 1996 and 2012, had stood third in 2017. A Kshatriya by caste, he managed to defeat Chauhan in this by-poll despite heavy mobilisation of caste leaders in particular OBCs by the BJP.
Chauhan served as a cabinet minister in the Adityanath government from 2017 to 2022 before resigning just weeks ahead of the assembly election and joining the SP. Chauhan, who had served as minister for forest, environment and zoological gardens, in his resignation letter had accused the BJP of tampering with reservations for OBCs and Dalits and neglecting their interests despite coming to power through their support. Chauhan belongs to the Noniya Chauhan backward caste. Traditionally engaged in salt trading, the community is also known by other names such as Loniya-Chauhan and Gole-Thakur, and consider Prithviraj Chauhan among their icons.
They are scattered in parts of east UP but are an important vote bloc in rural areas adjoining Varanasi, Azamgarh, Chandauli and Mau.
Chauhan was elected to the Rajya Sabha twice as an SP candidate, in 1996 and 2000. When Mayawati came to power in the state in 2007, he shifted loyalties and in 2009 won his first and only Lok Sabha election from Ghosi on a BSP symbol. He was also appointed the leader of the BSP parliamentary party in the Lok Sabha. In 2014, he lost his seat to the BJP. And a year after Narendra Modi came to power, Chauhan joined the saffron party and contested as its candidate from Madhuban seat in the 2017 assembly election. He won and was rewarded with a cabinet berth. In 2022, after rebelling against the BJP, he won from Ghosi on an SP ticket. However, he soon started distancing himself from the Opposition party and in July formally resigned as an MLA and joined the BJP.
The defeat in Ghosi reflects poorly on Om Prakash Rajbhar, who had just recently returned to the BJP and actively campaigned in the constituency, which has a substantial number of voters of the Rajbhar community, an OBC caste. By ensuring a BJP win, he could have demonstrated his indispensability.
On the other hand, this election also marked the return to active campaigning of Akhilesh ‘s uncle Shivpal Singh Yadav, who held several public meetings in the by-poll.
The return of Chauhan, who is also the president of the All-India Chauhan Federation, to the BJP in July assumed significance as the party lacked a popular face from the community after six-time MLA Fagu Chauhan was appointed as the governor of Bihar in 2019. Fagu Chauhan is the current governor of Meghalaya.
Since the rebellions by OBC leaders Swami Prasad Maurya, Om Prakash Rajbhar, Dara Singh Chauhan and others had caused heavy losses to the BJP in 2022, the party was desperate to set its caste arithmetic right as it approached 2024.
The BJP sees Purvanchal as a problem area.
Although the BJP and its allies won 273 seats in the 403-member assembly in 2022, it fared poorly in southern and central parts of east UP. A lot of the SP alliance’s 125 seats came from these backward regions. The BJP lost all seven seats in Ghazipur, three out of four in Mau, five out of nine in Jaunpur, five out of seven in Ballia, all ten in Azamgarh, four out of five in Basti, all five in Ambedkar Nagar, three out of six in Barabanki, all three in Kaushambi and five out of seven in Pratapgarh.
In the Ghosi by-poll, several BJP ministers, including deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brijesh Pathak, as well as its allies Sanjay Nishad, Ashish Patel and Om Prakash Rajbhar, campaigned heavily for Chauhan. The party deployed minister Danish Azad, its Muslim face, to reach out to Muslim voters in the constituency.
The SP had even accused the local police and administration of working on the instructions of the ruling party and trying to pressure people in Muslim areas against voting for it and harassing its workers. The party submitted a memorandum to the chief election officer of UP accusing the BJP of trying to influence the election.
On Friday, as Sudhakar Singh started building his lead over Chauhan, Nishad Party chief Sanjay Nishad, a cabinet minister under Adityanath, equated areas with a Muslim population to Pakistan and insinuated that the SP was ahead as only votes of Muslim areas had been counted till then.
“When boxes (EVMs) in Pakistan areas are counted, it seems like Pakistan is winning. But when the boxes in our areas come out, they (Pakistan) go out of the picture,” he said.
By-polls don’t generally reflect the larger mood of the people and it has been established in the last few elections that voters think differently when it comes to national elections. In 2018 too, the SP-led alliance won three crucial Lok Sabha by-poll elections in UP – Gorakhpur, Kairana and Phulpur – ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The 2019 election result turned out to be different. However, under the ever-changing political situation and high charged campaign by the ruling party to dismiss the prospects of INDIA, the Ghosi win is a big boost to the morale of the Opposition parties and their workers as they prepare to take on Narendra Modi, Adityanath and co in the Lok Sabha election.
While campaigning in Ghosi, Akhilesh had said the by-poll was not an ordinary assembly election but a message for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. After the win, Akhilesh said UP would once again lead the charge for change in power at the Centre.
Note: This report was edited since publication with the final tally of the bypoll results.