Mayawati gets mandate from UP

MAYAWATI TAKES THRONE: The BSP wins power after seven rounds of polling spread over a month.

              

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BSP chief Mayawati, a former teacher, has won the battle for Uttar Pradesh. She has won 208 seats in the Assembly and will form the new government—the first time in 14 years that a single party will rule the state.

The BSP’s coming to power is the result of an experiment in social democracy and caste mathematics. What is the secret of BSP’s victory? Where did SP err? Why didn’t BJP’s Hindutva work and will the Congress ever regain its glory days in UP? CNN-IBN’s Sagarika Ghose analysed the election results with Yogendra Yadav, of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, and CNN-IBN’s Editor-in-Chief Rajdeep Sardesai.

The politicians on the panel were BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, whose party got 48 seats and Congress leaders Salman Khursheed and Kabil Sibal, who got 21 seats.

CNN-IBN had predicted that the BSP would get 158+ seats—it got the trends rights but not the seats. Yogendra Yadav was not discouraged with his predictions. “The expectations people have from psephology, of seat forecast in a first-past the post system, with four parties competing, is rather unrealistic,” he said.

BSP bridges caste divide

Nobody though could have predicted that BSP’s Sarvasmaj Abhiyan policy—upper castes working with Dalits—would be so successful. Does BSP’s success prove that Mayawati has finally managed to break the caste barriers?

The BJP, which got its worst defeat in UP since 1991, stands in complete contrast to the BSP. The party was identified with Kalyan Singh, a Lodh. Did this imprison the party in a lower-caste identity, while the BSP earned wider appeal by selecting candidates from all castes?

Arun Jaitley said the BJP tried a “rainbow coalition” in UP. “We tried to get the upper castes and OBCs, and since 1991 we have been working systematically on caste alliances. We succeeded at times and didn’t another but this election was not about the traditional kind of social alliance. This election had one large idea behind it: who was in the best position to replace Mulayam Singh Yadav.

“The SP had its own support base: of Yadavs and part minority community. That base enabled it to end up at a mid-way position but outside that support base there was a huge desire for change and this desire cut across caste lines,’ said Jaitley.

Final results of the UP polls

“The social alliance, which he had forged in 15-16 years, started cracking down because our own voters found that the BSP was better suited to replace the SP and Mulayam Singh Yadav. The anti- Mulayam vote didn’t want to radically divide itself.”

The BJP projected Kalyan Singh as its chief ministerial candidate—a man who is associated with the Ram temple movement and who is regarded as the OBC warrior for Hindutva. Was he the right choice? Should the BJP have projected a younger leader?