Electoral Review

Salman Khurshid with Mritunjay Singh Yadav

After Akhilesh’s visit to the Siddapeeth Baba Gauri Shankar Mahadev temple in Kannauj during the campaign in May, BJP workers cleaned the temple with gangajal (holy water) in an attempt to purify it. The Samajwadi Party leadership immediately reacted, ‘The BJP believes that backward, Dalit, deprived and exploited people have no right to worship in a Hindu temple.’ On the defensive, the BJP leaders claimed that Yadav was an ‘electoral Hindu’ and was, of course, entitled to enter the temple, but he had been accompanied by Muslims, requiring the purification ritual. The incident was reminiscent of 2017 when Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had ‘purification rituals’ performed at his official residence in Lucknow after the Samajwadi Party’s defeat. There were no explanations then, but that was after the election. This time, it happened during the campaign.

The Kannauj incident had a silent but profound impact on the backward-caste voters, not just Yadavs but also the plethora of castes stuck between the BJP’s Hindutva claims and the Samajwadi Party’s underlining of their backward status in its PDA formulation. For the backward castes, and often for the parties that represent them, elections are seen as a space for samaan (dignity and self-respect) and only then as one for rozgar (employment). In an election that was very much about identity—an issue that liberal, upper-caste sections of the Opposition were reluctant to discuss—the Samajwadi Party’s winning campaign highlighted what it really meant to be Hindu for a majority under that umbrella.

In addition to the shift in SC votes towards the INDIA Alliance, yet another significant marker in Uttar Pradesh is the marginalization of the BSP, which gave space to the Bhim Army and the emergence of Chandrasekhar Azad as an electoral le