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.

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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

Elections 2019: From Pulwama to MSP, in west UP, the devil is in the detail

In UP's Jat belt, closer to Delhi, it's Pulwama, Modi but in the hinterland, it's back to economic basics.

Business Standard : Jawli village in Ghaziabad district is about 34 km to the east of Delhi and Khanupur in Muzaffarnagar district is 133 km away. The distance is a signifier at least in one aspect: closer to Delhi, the inhabitants of the rural pockets had the “national” picture in mind when they discussed elections. Pulwama, the air strikes and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘valour’ occupied the mind space. Further away from the National Capital Region (NCR), the issues were basic, impinging on people’s livelihoods and quotidian concerns. Although both the districts -- Jat-dominated Muzaffarnagar more so -- have families with historical links to the military and one or more members working in the armed forces, the perceptions about the India-Pakistan conflicts varied.

If Jawli celebrated Modi’s “courage”, at Shahpur Badoli, nearly 50 kms away, the students of Baghpat colleges asked tough questions. Amit Tomar, a 21-year Commerce student, said, “Till today, the government has not showed proof that 300 persons were killed by our Air Force in Pakistan. I have two brothers in the military, one in Srinagar and the other on the Punjab border so nobody can accuse me of being anti-national.”

Gyanendra Kumar and Bijendra Kasana are farmers from the Gujjar backward caste, owned land and a small dairy business in Jawli. “Note ‘bandi’ has finished off the once prosperous real estate business in these parts. Everything is done in white (money) so nobody wants to buy or sell property. Didn’t you see hundreds of unoccupied apartments in Ghaziabad?” asked Kasana.

Yet none of them blamed the Modi government for the market stagnancy. “We are looking only at Modi. Demonetisation was good because it eliminated the fly by night operators and dubious dealers. They thrived in our region, living in huge mansions with a fleet of SUVs. Where did the money come from? Modi wiped it out. It gives people like me who earn modestly, a good feeling,” said Sardar Singh, a Jawli diary farmer.

VK Singh, the former Army chief, is the Ghaziabad MP. Yet nobody here had a kind word to say about him. “He never showed his face. But he doesn’t matter because it’s all about Modi. Modi ordered our air force to bomb Pakistan, not the former general. It’s important to vote back Modi. Only he can keep our borders secure,” said Gyanendra Kumar.

But 21 km away, at Hasanpur-Mussoorie, a little town in Baghpat district that’s glutted with private academic institutes, including a sports college, the first voice of dissent against the BJP-led central government was audible. Onkar Yadav owns the Devas Public School. “I am a Samajwadi Party (SP) sympathiser but my family revolted against me (in 2014) and voted BJP. My sons were taken in by the ‘achche din’ (good days) slogan.