JAYANT BETS ON JATS, JATAVS AND MORE

The bypoll wins in the Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat and Rampur and Khatauli assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh have brought several positives for the opposition Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).

- Prashant Srivastava

The Khatauli seat, which it wrested from the ruling BJP after a long time, could emerge as a gamechanger for the opposition, especially for the Jayant Chaudhary-led RLD.

Chaudhary's experiment in bringing the Jat, Gujjar, Muslim and Dalit communities under one fold worked in Khatauli, where the RLD's Gujjar candidate Madan Bhaiyya defeated the BJP's Rajkumari Saini. Just before the election, firebrand Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad's Azad Samaj Party also announced their support to the SP-RLD alliance, which too played a major role in the victory of the alliance.

Jayant has announced that the alliance will continue till the 2024 general election. His push to bring the Jats and Jatavs (a Dalit community) together has raised some tension in the BJP camp as the party has high hopes for Uttar Pradesh's 80 Lok Sabha seats (the BJP alliance has 65 seats now).

Together, the Jats, Jatavs, Gujjars and Muslims make up over 40 per cent of the population of western UP. Jayant's coup in bringing in Bhim Army chief Azad and sealing the pact with the SP has shifted the focus to the castes.