Elephant tramples Hindutva in the “Heartland”

The real news of this UP election is not the SP’s defeat. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s vote share will still hover around 30 per cent, which may be the same as last time. His core constituency of Yadavs and Muslims seems to be by and large intact, minus some tactical voting by Muslims in favour of BSP.
The real news is the decimation of Hindutva at the very core. The BJP has suffered heavy losses in Awadh, the heartland of the Ram Mandir issue. This shows that the project of Hindu consolidation has collapsed in the Brahmanical heartland itself.
Another project of the BJP-RSS that has failed this time around is the Sanskritisation agenda. Faced with the impossibility of Hindu consolidation for its own sake, the BJP and RSS had been aiming at carving out a support base within the OBC category. The Sangh Parivar had been reaching out to OBCs with its celebrated cultural agenda as an agent of upward social mobility. While powerful backward castes like Yadavs (and even Jats in Western U.P., though they were never really Sanskritised) had begun to spurn this agenda, other backward castes were seen to be susceptible to it. But they seem to have gone with the BSP this time. In the Doab region of Western U.P. – the home of the Lodh leader Kalyan Singh – the BJP is not doing well. Kalyan Singh’s son was trailing from Dibai when reports last came in, though his daughter-in-law was leading in Atrauli bordering Aligarh. The Kurmi alliance has also not worked for the BJP. Sonelal Patel has in fact lost his Kurmi support base and Apna Dal is leading in just one seat, down from last time’s tally when it was not with the BJP. The Kurmis seem to have split in favour of Mayawati. It also seems that lower OBCs have turned in favour of Mayawati.
The third defeat of the BJP is the erosion of its own core base. The Brahmin votes have split this time. This is particularly obvious in south-eastern U.P. -- the region with the highest Brahmin concentration of about 20 per cent, which also contains Allahabad. In this region, the BSP has made massive gains and the BJP has lost ground. It seems that Mayawati’s Brahmin-Dalit alliance has worked here.
With the party hovering around 60 seats, it is the BJP’s lowest-ever Vidhan Sabha tally since 1991, though the condition is better than the 9 seats it got in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, which would translate into about 40-45 Assembly seats. The Rajput vote, which had gone with the SP in 2004 on account of Raja Bhaiyya, may have made this marginal difference because of Rajnath Singh.
The Congress has predictably done badly. Dreams of its revival due to the Rahul “charisma” were nothing but ignorance of politics. As I had said earlier, “charisma does not exist without a social base, and Congress is the only party for which no caste or religious community will primarily vote.”
But at about 180 seats Mayawati has gone beyond expectations. Mulayam is still crossing 100 as per expectations, what with a loyal constituency and an anti-incumbency factor combined. The one party that has really gone below expectations is the BJP.
Sanskritisation is perhaps passé in UP now. Rather than lower castes imitating upper castes, the latter are realigning behind the former. Some say that the Brahmins will appropriate the BSP’s Dalit movement, but with such a solid constituency this is unlikely. Dalit empowerment, albeit from above and not from the grass roots, is taking place in a predictable way. Power is converting an angry pressure group into a mainstream political group. Brahmins are flocking to it “opportunistically” for a share of the power that they have got used to, but also shedding their arrogance in the process. The future is bleak in UP for basically Brahmanical parties like Congress and BJP, as caste Hindus will now realign with Dalit and OBC parties, the former being a reversal of the famed Congress “coalition of extremes”, as Paul Brass once called it.