Lucknow
Samajwadi Party (SP) president and former Uttar Pradesh (UP) chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has adopted the party’s time-tested formula of combining the Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) vote banks to win the crucial 2022 UP elections.
Crafted originally by his father and party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, the robust M-Y bloc had helped the socialist party emerge as the number one political outfit in UP after its formation in 1992.
Now, with high-stakes UP polls barely two weeks away, Akhilesh Yadav has deployed the same winning strategy in ticket distribution with the two communities accounting for 49 of the seats, or more than 30 per cent of the total 159 candidates, declared this week.
The M-Y factor not only helped the SP form government in UP thrice — twice under Mulayam and once under Akhilesh — it also kept Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) away from power for nearly 15 years until a resurgent saffron party was voted to power in 2017. Later, Yogi Adityanath became the CM.
The BJP successfully combined the upper castes, non-Yadav OBCs (other backward castes) and non-Jatav Dalit communities to notch up more than 75 per cent of the UP assembly seats in 2017. The M-Y bloc of the SP perceptibly lost to the saffron party’s deft social engineering.
However, the SP is now reviving its old potion of success to outsmart the BJP by reverting to its vaunted M-Y template. The SP is also attempting to win over non-Yadav OBCs in its larger game plan, especially after the induction of former UP minister and BJP turncoat Swami Prasad Maurya in the socialist party fold.
As such, the non-OBCs comprise 48 of the 159 nominations done by the SP so far, while 31 Dalits and 24 upper castes are among the other ticket constituents.
SP has formed a pre-poll alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which has so far announced 33 candidates. This pegs the total nominations by the SP-RLD combine at 192.
Of the total 192 tickets declared by the SP-RLD bloc, the Muslim candidates’ strength is 36 or nearly 20 per cent. Most of these seats are in the Western UP region, where the minority community has a sizable population of up to 30-40 per cent in some constituencies.
The UP assembly elections would be held in seven rounds on Feb 10, 14, 20, 23, 27 and March 3 and 7. According to the Election Commission of India (ECI), there are more than 150 million registered voters in UP.