UP Elections 2017: Battle Of The Battered

The four-sided fight in Uttar Pradesh has no clear frontrunner, as the parties are yet to clear their own mess.

- Ajay Uprety, Pratul Sharma & Soni Mishra

It is a race of four lame horses—the one that is unfolding in the Gangetic Plain. There are no clear winners, and none of the contestants is counting on his or her strengths. On the contrary, every one of the four racers is looking over the shoulders and checking who is the least lame among them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had swept the state in the Lok Sabha elections two and a half years ago, is worried about the common man’s wrath over the note ban. The Samajwadi Party, which ruled the state for five years and acquitted itself creditably, is split down the middle in an ugly family feud. This should have been advantage to the third contender, the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati, which was hoping to cash in on the dalit anger against the BJP and the Muslim anger against the SP. But the party is finding itself being deserted by leaders of those very same communities that are supposedly angry with the BJP and the SP. And the Congress, despite the early launch of an elderly Sheila Dikshit and talk of unleashing new poll tactics under an outsider, seems lost in the crowd.

The picture was not so dismal till a few months ago. Every one of the four parties was looking forward to a good fight, one in which all of them had looked bright, shining, wiry and puissant. The BJP was riding high on the popularity of the 56-inch-chested Narendra Modi who has been supping with world leaders, talking of bullet-train projects, cleaning up the Ganga to its divine purity, and ordering surgical strikes at the bad mashes across the borders. The party was hoping to make the Uttar Pradesh polls a mid-term appraisal of the Modi regime. Party chief Amit Shah, who engineered an impressive win in 2014, was looking for a repeat show, counting on the 300 assembly segments that his party had won in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.