UP setback a wake-up call for BJP

“Politics, Otto von Bismarck famously said, “is the art of the possible, the attainable…” Bismarck has been convincingly vindicated by the recent alliance between Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) alliance in Uttar Pradesh (UP) during the two bye-elections to the Lok Sabha. Who would have thought that the two arch enemies in UP’s politics would join forces against their common enemy – Bharatiya Janata Party? But they did come together and dealt a body blow to the BJP with a humiliating defeat in the prestigious bye-elections in Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha constituencies in UP.

The stunning defeat of the BJP comes as a rude wake-up call for the party, coming as it does when the General Elections are just about a year away. The BJP derives most of its Lok Sabha strength from UP. It had won 71 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP in 2014, representing more than 25% of the total Lok Sabha seats won by the BJP in 2014. Hence, the loss of two prestigious seats represented by the chief minister and deputy chief minister is a warning sign for the BJP which it must heed if it hopes to stay in office in Delhi beyond the current term that ends next year.

So what went wrong for the BJP? To attribute the loss to the ‘overconfidence’ of the party cadre is to miss the woods for the trees. The real reason for the stunning victories of the SP candidates in the two constituencies is the alliance between SP and BSP, which underscores the fact that if these two parties, along with the Congress, come together in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP faces the dreadful prospect of being trounced at the hustings, which will effectively quash all its chances of returning to power once again in 2019.

The BJP now needs to pull up its socks and try to deliver on the promises it had made in 2014. The BJP’s image of being a party of shetji-bhatji (industrialists and upper castes) will not help it to win the elections nor will chunavi jumlas (poll gimmicks) work every time. The BJP needs to do a lot at the grassroots level to win over the confidence of the farmers and workers, who constitute a vast majority of the electorate in the country. When a vast majority of people are disillusioned with the party in power, the writing on the wall is there for all to see.