The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Congress-led INDIA bloc are about to engage in a significant face-off, not only for the forthcoming Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand but also in the byelections to be held in mid-November in 48 Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats across 15 States. The byelection were necessitated as several State legislators got elected to Parliament in April-June this year. Some others passed away while holding office.

The byelections take place in the backdrop of the resurgence of the INDIA bloc in the Lok Sabha election, which can be primarily attributed to opposition unity. But then came the Congress’ setback in the Haryana Assembly election, setting the clock back on the collective achievements attained less than six months ago. Considered the vanguard of the opposition until recently, the Congress spurned seat adjustments with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Haryana. The strategy did not work and tested the tenacity of the INDIA bloc.

On October 9, a day after the Haryana election results were out, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav caused a stir by announcing party candidates for the Uttar Pradesh byelections. A visibly rattled Congress tried to bargain but given its weakened position after Haryana, it gave in. Indeed, it could not claim any moral high ground now. The SP had wanted to contest in a dozen seats in Haryana but eventually scaled down its demand to three. The Congress refused to concede even a single seat, and its leaders declared they would go it alone.

If there was a lesson in that fiasco, the Congress seemed oblivious of it as it failed to secure any alliance with INDIA bloc partners in Rajasthan. In Maharashtra and Jharkhand, too, INDIA bloc candidates are pitched against each other in “friendly fights”. The Left parties are contesting on their own in both States.

Also Read | Congress’ old guard: The party’s strength or its stumbling block?

Nine Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, seven in Rajasthan, six in West Bengal, five in Assam, four each in Bihar and Punjab, three in Karnataka, two each in Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Sikkim and one each in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Meghalaya and Uttarakhand are up for byelections. Wayanad in Kerala and Nanded in Maharashtra are the two parliamentary constituencies facing byelections. Wayanad is going to witness a high-profile electoral fight with Priyanka Gandhi contesting the seat vacated by her brother, Rahul Gandhi. The byelection at Nanded was necessitated by the death of Congress stalwart Vasantrao Chavan. The Congress is expected to win both seats comfortably.

Another high-profile contest will be the one for the Karhal Assembly seat in Uttar Pradesh where Tej Pratap Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav’s nephew and Laloo Prasad Yadav’s son-in-law, is one of the candidates.

In 24 of the Assembly seats facing byelections, the outgoing MLAs are either from the Congress or the BJP. In the rest, the incumbents are from regional parties that are part of either the NDA or INDIA. Eleven of the 15 States where byelections will be held are ruled by the NDA; the Congress, Trinamool Congress, AAP, and the Left Front are in power in the remaining four.

Byelections outcomes in Assembly seats are generally expected to swing in favour of the party in power, and voters are usually unlikely to upset the status quo. Yet, there might be a few surprises in store this time. In West Bengal, the Trinamool has a grip on five of the six seats going to poll, though the BJP was the runner-up in all five in the last Assembly election. The thing to watch out for is whether the R.G. Kar protests will impact the voting. INDIA bloc parties appear to have an edge in the four Assembly seats in Bihar, though the entry of Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party can skew things a bit, especially in seats where the margin of victory was low last time.

Lack of coordination among INDIA partners

The Assembly byelections outcomes are going to be politically significant. For instance, it could well be a learning experience for the Congress on building and retaining alliances. In Rajasthan, the Congress holds four of the seven seats going to polls; its INDIA bloc allies Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLTP) and Bhartiya Adivasi Party (BAP) hold one each at present, and so does the BJP. Unlike in Uttar Pradesh, where it declined to field candidates against the SP after some afterthought, in Rajasthan the Congress has nominated candidates in all seven seats. For the Lok Sabha election, it had an alliance with the RLTP and BAP. Congress leaders campaigned for their alliance partners and vice versa, and the strategy paid off. The Congress won as many as eight seats and other INDIA parties three in a State where the BJP had won all 25 seats in 2019. Inexplicably, the Congress has chosen to go it alone in the byelections.

The absence of its top State leaders in the campaigning for the byelections seems to reinforce the impression that the Congress is not serious about winning any of the seven seats. Both Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot were packed off to Maharashtra as senior party observers, leaving the task of leading the byelections campaign to State party president Govind Dotasra.

Relations between the two leaders are reportedly still far from amicable. “If Gehlot patches up with Pilot, he will likely lose his support within the party for taking Pilot’s side,” said a senior functionary in the State unit. There is apparently resentment, within both the BJP and the Congress, over the choice of candidates and promotion of dynastic politics. But the most important thing that has emerged about the byelections in Rajasthan is the lack of coordination between INDIA alliance partners.

Rajiv Gupta, a retired professor of sociology from Rajasthan University, said the Congress was not playing the role of an effective opposition. “It is not enough to issue statements. The party has to be seen on the ground, doing something. The BJP government has, in the last one year, undone so many good schemes of the previous government. It has not held good on its election manifesto promises. The number of sanctioned teaching posts in universities is huge. The government directly participates in all religious programmes as if that is the only form of democratic governance. It will deploy polarisation tactics in these byelections as it did in the Lok Sabha election. The Congress should protest aggressively and get its INDIA partners on board on this if it seriously considers taking on the BJP. The two top leaders should also work together as that message will then resonate below,” he said.

As for the BJP, it is a win-win even if it only retains the reserved seat of Salumber. Any improvement of its tally in the Assembly will appear to vindicate the choice of Bhajan Lal Sharma, a virtual political non-entity, as Chief Minister. The BJP central leadership handpicked Sharma, overruling the claims of satraps such as Vasundhra Raje and Rajendra Singh Rathore.

Poll postponement stirs up controversy

The upcoming byelections have not been free from controversy. The Election Commission, which had announced the byelections on October 15, altered the polling date in some States on November 4. It said it had received representations from political parties, mostly NDA constituents, and some social organisations, which did not want polling to be held on November 13 because of a religious festival around that time which would reduce voter participation. The EC postponed the byelections to November 20 in all the nine seats in Uttar Pradesh, all four in Punjab and in Kerala’s Palakkad. The SP, a critical player in the Uttar Pradesh byelections and supposedly holding an edge in most of the seats, cried foul. In a statement on X, Akhilesh Yadav said this was an “old trick to avert inevitable defeat”. The postponement gives all parties an extra week’s time to campaign.

RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav at an election meeting in Bihar’s Ramgarh Assembly constituency on November 4.
| Photo Credit:
PTI

The EC could have taken note of the festival before notifying the byelections dates on October 15. Once it had announced the date, it should have stuck to it. The postponement in as many as 14 seats, 10 days before the scheduled date, was not seen as conforming to decorum. In fact, the EC had rescheduled the Haryana election from October 1 to October 5 following a representation on similar lines from the BJP. Notably, in Haryana’s case, the BJP was the only party that made such a representation.

BJP falls backs on polarisation tactics

THE EC has once again failed to invoke the Model Code of Conduct with respect to speeches made by BJP leaders including the Prime Minister. In Jharkhand, communal and hate speeches pitching tribal people against minorities seem to be par for the course now. The idea seems to be to replicate the electoral success of Haryana. The strident appeal to oust “illegal immigrants”, the call to “save bread and daughters” (roti aur beti) and usher in a uniform civil code exempting the tribal population but not minorities are all part of the broad Hindu consolidation that the BJP seeks to achieve, one that would include tribal populations.

Also Read | How did the BJP pull off an unexpected win in Haryana?

All the old tricks are out of the bag, including divisive language that brands minorities as “ghuspathiye” (infiltrators) and the familiar bogey of a demographic threat to Hindus. With Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma leading the charge from the front, this has become the new catchword for the BJP in every election. The more insidious aspect of the BJP’s campaign is a call to “unite all Hindus” with the slogan of “Batenge to katenge” (divided, we will be slaughtered). This call for Hindu unity is not entirely new, but this time it is being aggressively pushed not only by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath but by the Prime Minister as well. Observers say this is in response to the Congress’ caste census demand and its successful campaign that the BJP will alter the Constitution if it attains a brute majority.

The attempt to drive a wedge between tribal people and minorities may not succeed in Jharkhand where the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha is aligned to a strong tribal identity. The BJP’s strategy in the State is in any case at odds with its attempts to engineer a pan-Hindu identity in the rest of the country. Chief Minister Hemant Soren has in the past called for a separate religious code for tribal people and emphasised that they are not Hindus. However, the trope of “illegal immigrants” does have strong emotive appeal. Unless it is countered effectively, it might resonate with voters in the States where byelections are being held.

The BJP takes every election, from the panchayat level upwards, seriously. It is time the opposition did, too.

The Congress has asked for a third seat from the Samajwadi Party for the bypolls in Uttar Pradesh as the party is unhappy with the two seats allocated to it, according to an India Today TV report.

Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had informally discussed the seat-sharing for upcoming bypolls during the swearing-in ceremony of Omar Abdullah as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar on October 16, the report said citing sources.

Currently, the Samajwadi Party has offered Ghaziabad and Khair seats to Congress. However, Congress is still claiming the Phulpur seat, where the Samajwadi Party has announced its own candidate, it added.

Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Congress in-charge Avinash Pandey, Party Chief Ajay Rai, and Party Leader Aradhana Mishra are negotiating with the Akhilesh Yadav-led party. However, the Samajwadi Party is not planning to give more seats, the report said.

The seat-sharing issue comes as Congress is under immense pressure from its allies to revise its poll strategy after the disappointing Haryana Assembly Election results and its failure to secure a seat in the Jammu region.

However, there are speculations that the Gandhi family discussed the Phulpur seat with Akhilesh Yadav, a seat where the Samajwadi Party has chosen Mustafa Siddiqui candidate, who had lost the previous election, the report stated.

The top leaders of Congress and Akhilesh Yadav will soon finalise the seat-sharing for UP bypolls, the report added citing sources from Congress.

The UP bypolls for nine seats will be conducted on November 13. The nine seats will include Karhal (Mainpuri), Meerapur (Muzaffarnagar), Katehari (Ambedkar Nagar), Ghaziabad, Sisamau (Kanpur), Majhawan (Mirzapur), Phulpur (Prayagraj), Khair (Aligarh), Kundarki (Moradabad).

The seats fell vacant after the MLAs were elected as MPs in Lok Sabha Elections 2024, while Samajwadi Partly MLA from Sisamau, Irfan Solanki, was disqualified on criminal charges.

The counting of votes is scheduled for November 20.

The Congress and Samajwadi Party had previously contested together as the INDIA bloc for Lok Sabha elections.

Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, who was allegedly denied entry into the JP International Centre in Lucknow, garlanded a bust of Jayaprakash Narayan mounted atop a vehicle outside his residence on Friday. The incident took place in the wake of the freedom fighter’s birth anniversary.

The SP chief took to social media to share pictures of him garlanding the bust as he was surrounded by a huge crowd on the streets of Lucknow.

Yadav captioned the photos as, “Tributes to great freedom fighter Loknayak Jai Prakash Narayan on his birth anniversary. We won’t stop, we won’t be afraid. They will suppress us, we will bow down. Long live Samajwadi Party!”

What is JP Narayan statue row?

In his earlier posts on X, Yadav alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government prevented “Samajwadi people” or socialists from garlanding the statue of “Jai Prakash Narayan Ji” on his birth anniversary.”

He alleged that barricades were put up near his house as authorities blocked his visit to the JP International Centre in Lucknow, citing security concerns.

Hundreds of SP workers also assembled outside Yadav’s residence as ambiguity remained over Yadav’s scheduled visit to the Jayaprakash Narayan International Centre (JPNIC).

At around 10.30 am, a bust of Narayan, mounted on a vehicle, was garlanded by Yadav on the road packed with SP workers.

What we know so far

1. Samajwadi Party leader ST Hasan hit out at the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, saying it looked looked like they would celebrate Godse’s birth anniversary and not of freedom fighters.

“Every Indian is proud of him and SP has the right to celebrate his birth anniversary. I can’t understand why they don’t want to let us celebrate his birth anniversary. Looks like they will celebrate Godse’s birth anniversary and not of freedom fighters. We are ashamed of this govt and their conduct. We condemned how Akhilesh Yadav is being stopped,” Hasan was quoted by ANI as saying.

2. SP national general secretary Professor Ram Gopal Yadav called upon Samajwadi Party workers and leaders on Friday to block the roads from Akhilesh Yadav’s residence in Lucknow to Jaiprakash Narayan Convention Center.

3. Akhilesh Yadav triggered a controversy by urging Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to withdraw his party’s support from the BJP-led central government on this matter. He said, “Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar emerged from his (Jai Prakash Narayan) movement. This is a chance for Nitish Kumar to withdraw support from the government which is not allowing the Socialist to pay tribute to Jai Prakash Narayan on his birth anniversary.”

4. JD(U) national spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad called Yadav’s remarks “bizzare”. He was quoted by PTI as saying, “It is a bizarre remark from Akhilesh Yadav who does politics in the name of JP (Jayaprakash Narayan), but never cares for the principles of the late leader who fought against dynasty rule all his life”.

Prasad also slammed Congress leader Pawan Khera for endorsing Yadav’s statement and pointed out “it is the Congress which had caused untold miseries to JP and his followers”.

5. Meanwhile, BJP leader Shazia Ilmi said that Yadav should break his alliance with parties that Jai Prakash Narayan spoke against if he wants to give a tribute.

“If he really wants to give an honest tribute to Jai Prakash Narayan, then he should break his alliance with the parties against which Jai Prakash raised his voice during the Emergency and went to jail. He should stop his drama. Even he is aware that there are other ways to pay respect. Akhilesh Yadav should refrain from such political stunts. He should remember that it was Vajpayee’s government who awarded Jai Prakash Narayan…,” Ilmi was quoted as saying.

Catch all the Business News, Politics news,Breaking NewsEvents andLatest News Updates on Live Mint. Download TheMint News App to get Daily Market Updates.

MoreLess

Akhilesh Yadav has the relaxed demeanour of the political giant killer that he proved to be in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. The former Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief knows his place in the sun and shares insights with ease. In contrast, the ruling BJP in Uttar Pradesh is tied up in knots as the party’s leaders admit they had no clue what was coming (the BJP won 33 of the State’s 80 seats and the SP won 37). There is also no clarity about future equations, be it in the party’s State unit or between Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the national BJP, where Home Minister Amit Shah continues to reign supreme.

So when we tracked down Lallu Singh, the two-term BJP MP from Faizabad (the seat that includes Ayodhya), who spectacularly lost to the SP’s Dalit veteran Awadhesh Prasad, all he would say was that he had nothing to say. His silence was revealing, as was the extreme caution about not being quoted in any media or social media outlets. Over the years, as Faizabad MP and earlier as an MLA for five terms, Lallu Singh, whose origins are in the RSS, has been an accessible political figure. But this historic defeat at the epicentre of Hindutva mobilisation has silenced him, presumably because it is not clear which level of the party leadership is to be blamed, the national wing that bet all on the Ram Mandir or the State wing that actually handled the ground-level arrangements.

Discontent in Ayodhya

However, other voices were heard loudly in Ayodhya: BJP supporters, loyalists, and workers spoke openly of the constant harassment that followed the build-up to, and the aftermath of, the January 22 inauguration of the Ram Mandir. Pandit Shiv Das, who has voted for the BJP all his life and attended the temple inauguration, said that the people of Ayodhya were harassed by the police and the bureaucracy. VIP zones were created, lands taken, and properties bulldozed, and it became difficult for residents to even move about freely.

Also Read | A stunning rebuke to Narendra Modi’s divisive, anti-Muslim rhetoric

Das also explained how small-scale industries lost out. For instance, earlier local people made and sold diyas from handcarts at the temples, but their livelihoods have now been destroyed, with all temple-associated businesses going to outsiders and big contractors. At a khadi store stacked with “Jai Shri Ram” stoles, a resident told us that what happened on Ram Navami this year (April 17), should have sent out warning signals. Most of the laddoos prepared in anticipation of several lakh visitors on that day had to be thrown away because people just could not reach Ayodhya and many did not even attempt to come as the town has stopped being a place for ordinary pilgrims.

These complaints come from sections that are loyal to the BJP, and are mostly dominant caste. Of the five Assembly segments that constitute the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat, the BJP was behind in four but ahead by a few thousand votes in the Ayodhya city segment. Beyond the disaster in Ayodhya, a larger story played out across the State: OBCs and a section of Dalits voted against the BJP. The SP’s groundwork for nearly two years on what it called the PDA (pichda, or backward caste; Dalit; and alpasankhyak ,or minority) coalition paid off.

Byelections for 10 Assembly seats are due in October-November, and the BJP will be hoping that the people’s anger has been assuaged and that some dominant caste and urban voters who did not cast their vote will return, now that the party is in a crisis. It is also looking for a shift in the OBC and Dalit vote. While Adityanath has been given a free hand, there is anxiety here, at a time when the subaltern groups are shifting away from the BJP, as he is from the dominant Thakur caste. Akhilesh Yadav has raised the issue of the rape and murder of two Dalit teenagers who were found hanging in Farrukhabad, and begun a campaign to say the BJP is fundamentally anti-women, besides being anti-OBC and anti-Dalit.

Back to basics for the BJP

Still, Adityanath will use the administrative machinery in every possible way. For the BJP it is back to basics on every front, such as displaying anti-Muslim bias through rhetoric, policy, and harping on the community getting special treatment when it is actually being targeted. The psych-ops of so-called Hindu victimhood are currently in full flow since the BJP’s politics at the elemental level begins and ends with obsessing over and targeting Muslims.

The SP and the Congress are on an entirely different tack, demanding a caste census and the expansion of reserved categories. The SP has been diligent in highlighting examples of reserved jobs going to general category candidates and large-scale corruption in land allotment in Ayodhya. Former MLA and local SP leader Pawan Pandey has tirelessly highlighted cases of villagers not getting adequate compensation for lands, such as those acquired for the airport in Ayodhya, and of big builders “with Gujarat connections” getting prized lands for a song.

The other crisis confronting the BJP comes through when talking to villagers in Mohanlalganj, a reserved Lok Sabha seat on the outskirts of Lucknow. The BJP was defeated here despite a very efficient outreach of free rations to households to get the labharthi (beneficiary) vote. The working-class families here did receive free rations, but they consider it their right and not largesse from the Modi/Yogi regime. As one of them quipped: “Are we dogs at whom they throw rotis? Or the bandua mazdoor [bonded labour] of Dilli Raja and Lucknow Maharaja?”

Also Read | Modi ramps up rhetoric in Hindi heartland as BJP struggles to regain its sparkle

It is a lesson in itself that in the Mohanlalganj seat, a two-term Pasi Dalit MP of the BJP, Kaushal Kishore, was defeated. Ironically, a Pasi Dalit (Awadhesh Kumar) triumphed in Faizabad. This is the reality in the part of Uttar Pradesh referred to as Awadh. At one of the stops on the road from Lucknow to Allahabad that passes Rae Bareli, an old wizened farmer, Lalla, who voted for the Congress in the Unchahar segment of the Rae Bareli seat, said: “We did what we had to.” Life is difficult and hopes of jobs have dimmed, while falling sick is a disaster in the face of the poor public health infrastructure in the State.

So, when the cup brimmeth over with bad news, there is to be a crackdown on its dissemination. Adityanath’s new social media policy enforces stringent punishment, such as a life-term, for content deemed abusive and “anti-national” and tries to promote “positive content” offering payment up to Rs.8 lakh to those who create videos, posts, or tweets about the achievements of the regime. If it was not so terrible, it would be hilarious. Now paid influencers will get paid more to praise the Adityanath regime, even as ordinary folks and the media could be harassed for even a critique. It sounds like North Korea, but it is the republic of Uttar Pradesh, where the ruling party has been badly jolted.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.