Equal Contest

While the BJP is banking on Central schemes to woo voters, the BSP-SP alliance is hoping its caste arithmetic will pay dividends

- Puja Awasthi

IF POLITICS IS the art of performance, Uttar Pradesh could well be the theatre of the absurd.

Vying for the 80 front row seats in this theatre are the BJP and a mahagathbandhan of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party with a bit role for the Rashtriya Lok Dal. The Congress, going by its president Rahul Gandhi’s statements, is offering cues to the alliance from the wings.

Amid this, in Gorakhpur, a seat won five times by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a garbled script is unfolding. In 2014, the BJP won the seat with a margin of 3.12 lakh votes. In 2017, the five assembly seats under it, too, voted in its favour. But in the 2018 bypoll following Yogi’s resignation, the SP candidate polled some 20,000 more votes than the BJP nominee. In Phulpur, which was the constituency of Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, the margin of loss was higher at 59,460. Kairana, which went to vote following its MP’s death, recorded a victory margin of 44,618 for the SP-supported RLD candidate. These losses carried weight as they were spread across the state—Gorakhpur in the east, Kairana in the west and Phulpur in between. The war paint on Yogi, who had led the campaign refusing help from the central leadership, began to peel off.

Surheeta Kareem, the Congress candidate in the Gorakhpur bypoll, tells THE WEEK that there is no longer the feeling that this is Yogi’s seat. “In 2017, there was a hangover of the 2014 polls. But Gorakhpur got nothing to show that it was the CM’s constituency despite his visits every three weeks,” she says.