WITH one bunch of Assembly elections done and dusted, it is time for political parties to turn their gaze on the next slew of state polls scheduled to be held in the first half of 2027, including in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Among the next seven states going to the polls is the biggest prize of them all — Uttar Pradesh. Five of the states, including the coveted UP, are BJP-governed. The UP legislature has 403 seats while it sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha pool of 543 seats, constituting nearly 15%. No wonder, conventional political wisdom has it that the outcome of the UP Assembly election impacts and shapes the destiny of the ensuing Lok Sabha polls.
As things stand, the BJP is in a commanding position, having served two terms in office since 2017 under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. However, it is challenged by an energised Samajwadi Party (SP) that has reasons to be optimistic: first for raising its Assembly strength from 47 in 2017 to 111 in 2022 and then for picking up more seats than the BJP in the last Lok Sabha polls. The SP won 37 seats and the BJP 33, although the vote shares seem skewed. The BJP posted 41.7% while the SP got 33.8%. But the SP’s alliance with the Congress also added the Congress’s 9.5% vote share and the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s 1% to its share (the RLD hadn’t then moved to the BJP).
Beaten by the dismal showing in Bihar, where the Congress was disrespectful to its partner, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in the 2025 elections and stands accused of being imperious in general towards its allies, the Congress has gone the extra mile to assure the SP that they will work and fight the polls jointly. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), once perceived as India’s premier party of Dalits and other backward classes (OBC) at the tail end of the caste hierarchy, continues to lie low, although it retains a 13% vote share, making it a useful add-on in case the verdict is unclear.
The presence of a myriad caste-based entities, such as the Apna Dal (Soneylal), the RLD, Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal (NISHAD), an acronym that fits in perfectly with the Nishad caste whose interests it fosters, Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, the Jansatta Dal (Loktantrik) and the Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), mostly floating in the BJP’s orbit, demonstrates three trends: small as they are, they retain influence over certain caste groups and thwart their movement towards the BJP and the SP; they are not dictated to by the BJP’s ideological rubric and their electoral arrangements remain flexible.
The Azaad Samaj Party, founded and headed by Nagina MP Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, has never joined a coalition despite promising the SP to do so before every election. Its prospective emergence as a BSP alternative (it still has a long way to go) nonetheless makes it an attractive bait for a larger party. The rest live under the NDA umbrella, although each of them is demanding a large share of the pie in the impending panchayat polls, which, however, are not fought on party symbols. But the local bodies are appropriated by the parties later after bitter squabbles.
Despite the setback that the BJP suffered in the last Lok Sabha polls, its dominance persists on account of two factors: the volatility of the Hindutva factor, which waxes and wanes, depending on the electorate’s mood and the “popularity" of Adityanath, who, it seems, has incontestably demonstrated that if he goes, UP’s law and order situation would irreparably deteriorate. That the two are intertwined was apparent when he recently ordered Muslims not to offer namaz on the streets and in public places before Eid-ul-Adha, even as the traffic disruptions caused year after year by the yatris going on kanwariya pilgrimages to Haridwar from Delhi and Haryana are indulgently allowed by the administration.
As for working out the caste equations, Yogi’s indulgence of his Rajput community members is embedded in political lore, although Rajput votes alone cannot win a seat, no matter how powerful its leaders are. To try and blunt the edge of Yogi’s alleged pro-Rajput appeasement, the BJP’s central leaders ensured that in the latest UP Cabinet shake-up, the “winning" coalition of Brahmins plus non-Yadav OBCs and Dalits was adequately reflected in the induction of the ministers. For instance, Manoj Kumar Pandey, a Brahmin who defected from the SP in 2024, was given the plum Food and Civil Supplies Department, which oversees ration distribution and delivery of food-related welfare schemes to crores of beneficiaries and is, hence, a source of patronage. The CM had reportedly shortlisted the names of four Rajput MLAs, but none of them made the cut.
Are Hindutva and appropriate caste equations sufficient to buck a 10-year anti-incumbency and, importantly, the tensions within the state BJP, especially when certain leaders thought to be Yogi dissenters are “encouraged" by Delhi to annoy the CM? There are straws in the wind suggesting that it wasn’t easy to cement the internal differences.
AK Sharma, a former Gujarat cadre bureaucrat, is UP’s Energy and Urban Development Minister. He was inducted against Yogi’s express wishes allegedly because of his proximity to the Delhi power cabal. When Sharma was not “dropped" in the latest shuffle — as Yogi wishfully expected — a hoarding with Sharma’s mug was put up close to the BJP’s Lucknow headquarters, captioned, “Even if the enemy wishes a million evils, what does it matter? What happens is what God deems fit." Observers believe a crucial test of the Yogi-versus-Delhi pull and pressure will manifest during the distribution of tickets for the Assembly polls.
The SP, led by Akhilesh Yadav, has doubtless put domestic troubles that plagued it in two elections behind, but the party is bracing for a tough fight. The challenges before the leaders are: lessening the impact of Hindutva so that they are not on the defensive, playing down the pro-Muslim rhetoric associated with the SP, assuring voters that law and order won’t go out of control in their dispensation as it usually does, firming up an alliance with the Congress on the SP’s terms and most critically, leveraging the PDA (Pichchada, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) social axis of OBCs, Dalits and minorities that Akhilesh had forged before the Lok Sabha polls to his advantage. The axis worked on the contention that the BJP was “pro-upper caste" and in its “zeal" to please the Brahmins and others, it was whittling down the statutory reservation quota in government jobs by outsourcing employment to the private sector. The SP’s line worked in 2024. By its own admission, it’s a long haul because it must regain 108 seats it lost in the last three Assembly polls.
