Unpredictable

In Uttar Pradesh, a historic win for INDIA, a symbolic moment for India

- Rakhi Bose

MOHAMMAD Mosam ‘Lohar’ was a happy man on June 4. He spent the day watching the results of the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections on television inside his home in Palda village of Muzaffarnagar in the western part of Uttar Pradesh.

Sanjeev Balyan, the sitting Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) MP from Muzaffarnagar, had lost to the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Harendra Mallik. On the tumultuous counting day, which threw up surprise after surprise in India’s politically most significant state, it wasn’t just Muzaffarnagar that flipped.

Across Uttar Pradesh, the BJP, which had swept 71 seats in 2014 and 62 seats in 2019, was reduced to 33 seats, with the Akhilesh Yadav-led SP emerging as the dominant party across the state with 37 wins. The Congress won nine, up from just one in 2019.

Mosam, who lost his childhood home in Kutba-Kutbi (the same village as Balyan’s) to the 2013 communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, feels that the election results represent a mandate against hate. “People have voted against communal polarisation and instead voted for issues that matter to aam janta (common people),” he said. 

The BJP’s surprise upset in Uttar Pradesh has led to much speculation and analysis. After two terms, the BJP, which was riding the Yogi-Modi wave, initially seemed confident in the face of anti-incumbency and projected to cash in big on the newly consecrated Ram mandir in Ayodhya.

Ayodhya and Hindutva rhetoric also featured heavily in the campaign speeches of the party’s star campaigners, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Adityanath Singh. “Why is Modi demanding 400 seats? Modi needs 400 seats to prevent Congress from putting a ‘Babri lock’ on Ram mandir,” Modi had said at a campaign rally in UP. At another rally, Adityanath had raised chants of “Jo Ram ji ko laaye hain, hum unko layenge (We will elect those who brought Lord Ram home)”.