Twenty five kilometres down the highway that connects Muzaffarnagar to Panipat via Shamli, on the fringe of western Uttar Pradesh, we slow down, stop at a small crossroad and roll down the window of our car.
A young child shows interest and we ask for directions to the village where a local election meeting is to be held shortly.
“Rally hai kya?” he asks, instead of giving us the direction. He doesn’t appear to be of the age to understand politics but nonetheless is excited at the prospect of an election meeting close by. He appears keen to guide us provided he gets a ‘lift’.
Eventually, our contact calls and after ascertaining where we were, asks us to stay put as he will go past where we were and lead the way to the venue of the meeting to be addressed by the Samajwadi Party candidate, Sudhir Panwar, a genteel professor of zoology and member of the UP Planning Commission.
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Contrast Between Profession & Political Stand
In these bad lands of the state, eternally branded due to the 2013 communal riots and polarisation that precipitated in BJP’s favour in 2014, professions of politicians are often at odds with their social roles. For instance, Sangeet Som, brand ambassador for social bigotry, Bharatiya Janata Party’s anti-beef crusader and sitting legislator from Sardhana, once had significant stakes in leading halal meat export companies.
The company claims to be “specialists in the export of quality halal buffalo, sheep/lamb, goat meat and hides,” clearly a far cry from the anti-beef crusade he has engaged in since 2013. Clearly, this contrast between profession and political calling alone justifies the professor’s electoral foray, though he is at pains to tell audiences that he is a ‘local’ person and names his village. Panwar needs to mention this because he was a late nominee of his party and is also making an electoral debut.
Test for Mayawati’s Poll Game Plan
Thana Bhawan, the quaint-sounding name for a UP township and Assembly constituency, is one of the five Assembly segments of Kairana parliamentary constituency. The constituency, besides its contemporary notoriety, is also a major milestone in the political path of a significant leader of the country – Mayawati.
Much before she made a mark for herself, she contested from here as an independent candidate in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections. She was badly bruised but not before convincing her mentor Kanshi Ram that a political platform was essential to win elections. The Bahujan Samaj Party was born in the wake of this election and the rest, as they say, is history.
The choice of Kairana as Mayawati’s launch pad indicates that the social reality in the constituency gave the BSP a foothold in the area. Thana Bhawan is significant because Mayawati’s ‘Dalit + Muslim’ formula will be tested here for the first time in this poll. The BSP has put up Abdul Waris Khan, a one-time Rashtriya Lok Dal legislator, who will be a formidable challenger given his political entrenchment here.
Hindutva-Centric Agenda Makes a Comeback
Thana Bhawan becomes a test constituency for another reason: the BJP has fielded sitting MLA and state Vice President Suresh Rana. This Assembly segment is the veritable epicentre of social polarisation because he was one of the prominent instigators of the 2013 riots, and was recently served a notice by the Election Commission for delivering an inflammatory speech.
Rana seldom shies from igniting communal passion. In his words: he “speaks the truth and if people think it is communal language, so be it”. Despite having claimed early that the BJP would seek votes on the back of the demonetisation and surgical strike decisions of the ruling party, the two issues have taken a backseat to the Hindutva-centric agenda. If the BJP’s ‘Operation Polarise’ has to succeed anywhere in the state, it must be in Thana Bhawan.
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Jats Feel Estranged from BJP
BJP leaders, however, are low on confidence in this aspect. The first answer from a Rana aide, Rishikesh Kumar, to a query on how the campaign was shaping up, was the claim that the Jats had come back to the party fold the night before.
The emphatic declaration is a pointer to two things: That the Jat community, which clashed with Muslims in 2013, are still estranged from the party; and that Rana’s performance depends on their return.
Secondly, all political and development issues have been kept on the back burner and the entire election is being fought on the basis of caste identity. Unless the voter has strategically not revealed her or his cards, the verdict is likely to be fragmented, like between 1993 and 2007 – the actual vanvaas period in the state’s politics, when no party secured a majority.
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RLD, A Serious Player in Western UP
The poll arithmetic in Thana Bhawan is complicated because the contest here is not just triangular but quadrangular, with the RLD also making a serious bid to register its presence. With Jat support for the BJP no longer a certainty, the Ajit Singh-led party is making a serious bid to woo the community.
In an innovative attempt to counter this, Panwar has been urging both Jats and Muslims that it was time for the two communities to their differences behind and wipe out the region’s shame. While the SP faces an uphill task because it is a relatively newer face in the polls, a good showing by the SP candidate would be indicative of a veritable SP-Congress wave in the state.
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‘Muslims Will Choose Between BSP and SP’
Chances of Muslims opting for tactical voting and going with BSP’s Khan to defeat the BJP candidate, makes this contest a keen one.
Haji Dildar Khan, a former pradhan from the village of Bunti Kheda, claims that despite Mulayam Singh Yadav and his party being a matter of faith for Muslims, many will be guided more by the objective to defeat the BJP than to endorse Akhilesh Yadav. “Muslims in each village will decide in groups whether the BSP or SP is best positioned to defeat BJP,” he said.
Off the main highways and political discourses, constituencies in this part of western UP hold the key not just for this election but for the future social reality and nature of issues that determine election verdicts. The combination of communal polarisation and Narendra Modi’s development spiel of 2014 is now history.
Whether voters in a representative Assembly constituency like Thana Bhawan revert to older political considerations while determining their choice or move ahead, is to be watched.
(The writer is an author and journalist based in Delhi. His most recent books are ‘Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984’ and ‘Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times’. He can be reached @NilanjanUdwin. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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