Elections 2019: Can the BJP repeat its 2014 performance in west UP?

The bottom line is that people seem to want Modi but not necessarily the BJP candidate.

Election 2019 : Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat, Kairana and Ghaziabad go to polls on April 11. The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)’s performance in both the 2014 Lok Sabha election and the 2017 Assembly elections in this area was record-beating.

Can the party repeat its record in 2019?

Take Baghpat. Arithmetic answers some of the question marks. Former Mumbai police commissioner, Union minister of state for HRD in the Modi government and Jat strongman Satyapal Singh has every resource at his command. In 2014, he trounced SP’s Ghulam Mohammad by a margin of just over two lakh votes, while Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Ajit Singh was relegated to the third position in his own ‘karma bhoomi’. This time, a youthful Jayant Chaudhary, heir to Ajit Singh and Chaudhary Charan Singh is trying out his fortune in Baghpat. And it is going to be tough, tough, tough for the BJP to retain the seat.

ALSO READ: BJP largest ad spender on Google, regional parties take second spot

The reason is caste. In 2014, Satyapal Singh polled around 400,000 votes and won by a margin of around 2.30 lakh. But add up the votes polled by Ajit Singh (who stood against him in 2014) and Ghulam Mohammad. Ajit Singh got around 1,99,000 and Mohammad got around 2.13 lakh. Their total vote is almost equal to the total votes polled by Satyapal Singh.

But assume for a moment that the followers of Ajit Singh and Ghulam Mohammad (who is not contesting this time) are not homogenous and some could also support the BJP.

The wild card is Prashant Choudhary.

In 2014, Baghpat took note of Choudhary who is a Gujjar leader and contested as a Bahujan Samaj Party candidate. Gujjars hold sway over parliamentary seats of Gautam Buddh Nagar,Meerut, Kairana, Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Bulandshaher and also Baghpat. They are influential although not that numerous in Baghpat (about 45,000 votes). He polled 1.42 lakh votes and is thought to have got, not just the majority of the Gujjar vote but also Dalits who are around 11 per cent of the population.

Business Standard