Samajwadi Party officials have been claiming these days that the popular MY alliance stands for Mahila plus Youth and not Muslim plus Yadav. How nice! Not only this, they also claim that BJP has successfully created a perception that SP is only about Yadavs and Muslims. Lets check the stats from the last election in UP i.e. the Loksabha Elections in 2019. I found a very interesting depiction of caste-religion based election results:
What do you see?
Samajwadi Party has MPs only from two categories, 40% of the MPs from the Yadav community and the rest 60% from the Muslim community. It is not that this only happens during Loksabha Elections, or it was one off instances. Its pretty much the same in UP Assembly election as well. Lets look an interesting depiction from the 2017 election results:
What do we see here?
70% of the Muslims voted for Samajwadi Party along with 80% of the Yadavs voted for Samajwadi Party. These are facts and not perception. Do I need to provide any further evidence to prove that Samjawadi Party is a party that feeds on vote bank politics and only vote bank politics? There would never be a 100%, if somebody is expecting that. Anurag Bhadoria can shout on television as much as he wants and claim that Y is Youth and M is Mahila. But we know the truth.
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Having said that, I did not write this article to refute Anurag Bhadoria’s MY references. That would just be a massive waste of my time. I am writing this article to show how Samajwadi Party under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav is not only going to lose any chance to form government but also get defunct pretty soon.
Vote bank politics especially the caste based politics has its own pros and cons for the political parties. While it is easy for the politicians to win by mere boosting egos of a particular caste and not doing any kind of work, but it also tightly couples the success of the party with the size of its vote bank. Let me ask you a few questions before going further:
- Why couldn’t Samajwadi Party (SP) form government in any state other than Uttar Pradesh, even when the party was at it’s peak during Mulayam Singh Yadav’s leadership? Forget about Akhilesh Yadav, he is not even close to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s political acumen.
- Why couldn’t Rastriya Janta Dal (RJD) form government in any state other than Bihar, even when the party was at it’s peak during Lalu Prasad Yadav’s leadership? Forget about Tejashwi Yadav, he is not even close to Lalu Prasad Yadav’s political acumen.
- Why couldn’t Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) form government in any state other than Uttar Pradesh, even when the party was at it’s peak?
All of them had national political ambitions but still could not make a mark outside their very restricted spaces. Why? If they were winning on their development work, they would have easily expanded outside their core vote banks. Wouldn’t they? Why didn’t it happen then? Answer: Their political expansion is very tightly coupled with their castes. If the population of Yadav community or Dalit community was substantial in other states, they would have expanded.
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I thought Akhilesh Yadav knows this, I guess I was wrong, may be he doesn’t; after all he inherited an empire build by his father and uncle (howsoever corrupt, unjust, immoral, unethical, vulgar and unfair that empire was), but he did inherit it without lifting a little finger to build it. He can say anything for the sake of saying; he can say it’s a progressive party or it’s a Mahila plus Youth party; he can say his government built everything; he can say women were the safest during his tenure; he can say Lord Krishna comes to his dream and for that matter Tej Pratap Yadav in Bihar can say he is Lord Krishna himself by playing flute and herding cattle. Its a democracy, anybody can say anything!
But irrespective of what he says he should know for a fact that his party is relevant as long as Yadavs vote for him. If only Yadav vote share slips, he would never see power again. This is the only reason why Mulayam Singh Yadav even at his peak, never thought of overlooking Yadavs; he always made efforts to pacify the egos of his community. Of course there were alliances, and people with contradictory ideologies joined the party but they were never publicized and celebrated the way Swami Prasad Maurya is being done today. Its not 90s anymore, where people would not know what is happening. There are abundant sources of information. This is an information age. People would know exactly what is happening, who is the party sharing power with etc.
Mayawati, in the past, did the exact same thing what Akhilesh Yadav is doing now, the great “social engineering” by bringing Brahmins to her party. Outcome: you see the party’s condition now, don’t you? Bringing a few Brahmin politicians by letting them in the ministry or nominating them for different seats helped Dalits see that Mayawati was using Dalits only and only for her vested interests; politics, power and wealth. That was the reason why Dalits especially non-jatavs started voting for BJP. Yadavs are going to see the very same thing now. The very same Yadav community is seeing for a fact that their relevance in the party is not the same as it used to be during Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tenure. Their share of the pie is being snatched by others.
Moreover, if the alliance with BSP did not work as also accepted by Akhilesh Yadav himself, how is an alliance with Omprakash Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party going to work? SBSP is a spin off of BSP; Ompraskash Rajbhar was Mayawati’s BSP’s champion party worker. In fact a lot of other people associated with Mayawati in the past are directly or via alliance supporting Samajwadi Party. Poor people and lower castes were the people most affected by Samajwadi rule, even when their leaders are put aside their differences to win an election, common people won’t. That’s why there was no vote transfer in the past and will be the same this time. Moreover, politicians like Omprakash Rajbhar have their own lists of castes that they want to get the reservation status. Why would castes already enjoying this privilege want to reduce their reservation percentage?
Samajwadi Party is clearly taking Yadavs for granted and no body enjoys to be taken for granted. This discontent among the Yadav community is the reason why I say, it would be an end of Akhilesh Yadav’s political career. It would be interesting to see how much Yadav vote share leaks out from Akhilesh Yadav’s hold this time.
Also read: Akhilesh Yadav’s SP will struggle to win 50 seats in the upcoming UP Elections 2022
By the way Rajbhar also wants caste based census. What does liberals, intellectuals and progressive section of India have to say about that? I guess BJP is the one who is indulged in caste politics. Akhilesh Yadav’s is supposedly posing a tough challenge to Yogi government as per the media houses based on solely the caste arithmetic: “X caste leader is supporting us, Y caste party has an alliance with us”, “Akhilesh Yadav is brilliantly bringing small caste leaders with him”, this caste and that caste.. that’s all. What does liberals, intellectuals and progressive section of India have to say about that? I guess BJP is the one who is indulged in caste politics.
Thanks for reading!!
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