- Tuesday, March 11, 2025
If the number of seats in which the opposition were leading in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh state elections are seen, the INDI Alliance might increase its tally by a good notch and limit the reach of the prime minister’s BJP.
By: Shubham Ghosh
EVEN a month ago, India’s opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) forum looked to be in a mess despite vowing to stop prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from winning the third consecutive term in power in the upcoming elections.
But suddenly, things have looked up and moving for the opposition. On Thursday (22), the Indian National Congress and Samajwadi Party (SP), a major player in India’s crucial electoral state of Uttar Pradesh, sealed a deal on seat-sharing. The SP will contest the election in 63 seats while the Grand-Old Party will field candidates in the remaining 17.
The Congress has also made arrangements with the Aam Aadmi Party in six states, including Delhi, Goa, Chandigarh, Haryana, Gujarat and Haryana over 46 seats. While the number of seats are less compared to those in the UP, but the Congress’s alliance with the AAP is the largest in terms of states.
Read: Modi’s opposition make seat-sharing deals for general polls in confidence booster
The NDA, on the other hand, is still to come up with a seat-sharing deal between the BJP and its smaller partners, notably Suheldev Bharatiya Janata Party (SBSP), NISHAD Party, Apna Dal (Soneylal) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, which recently decided to join the NDA after Modi conferred the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, on his grandfather Chaudhary Chandran Singh, a former prime minister and a noted farmer leader.
Read: 2024: A major election year for India, US
A senior Congress leader even take a swipe at the BJP over the matter, asking whether its smaller partners held it hostage.
The boost in confidence of the Congress party post its seat-sharing deal with two major allies was reflecting in the words of its leader.
But can the Congress’s alliance with the SP prove to be a game changer for the INDI Alliance?
In the 2022 state elections in Uttar Pradesh, the SP failed to capitalise on the anti-incumbency factor against the BJP government of Yogi Adityanath, but it learned its lessons. For instance, SP supremo and former chief minister of the state, Akhilesh Yadav, came up with a term PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpasankhyak or Backwards, Dalits, Minorities) alliance. Although the BJP and its allies have been sweeping elections in Uttar Pradesh since 2014 and still command a sizeable share of votes of non-Yadav sections of Other Backward Classes (OBC) and non-Jatav section of the Dalits in the state, the SP leadership noticed that a sizeable section of these communities are not too happy with Modi’s BJP.
Issues such as inflation, unemployment and agricultural challenges are believed to have fuelled the anti-incumbency mood among these communities. Accordingly, the SP decided to work on a strategy to reach out to those sections at the grassroots level.
The Congress, on the other hand, has also been trying to mobilise public opinion against the BJP across India. Its leader Rahul Gandhi has launched two pan-India marches since September 2022 — the south to north one called Bharat Jodo Yatra and the east to west one called Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra — to galvanise the anti-incumbency sentiments against Modi and his BJP.
Akhilesh Yadav joined the march in Agra in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday (25) where he raised the slogan ‘BJP hatao, desh bachao’ (kick out the BJP, save India).
In the 2022 state election, the SP managed to win a majority of Muslim and the influential Yadav votes, as per data from the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. However, it failed to attract the Dalit and other OBC votes as much. Their joining hands with the Congress could help in overcoming this challenge.
Siddhath Kalhans, a veteran journalist based in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, told The Wire that while the Congress can help in softening the SP’s image and widen its appeal to voters across the board, the latter can boost the former’s winnability perception.
Both the Congress and SP can be assured of getting the Muslim votes because of their similar ideological goals and the BJP’s pro-Hindu electoral appeal.
Now looking at the electoral arithmetic in Uttar Pradesh where the BJP and its ally AD (Soneylal) together won 64 seats out of 80, one cannot overlook the opposition’s strength altogether. In the 2022 state elections in Uttar Pradesh, the SP-led opposition had a vote share of more than 38 per cent, if one included the Congress which fought alone. The BJP and its allies, on the other hand, had around 44 per cent of the vote share.
However. in India’s first-past-the-post system, vote percentage doesn’t automatically translate into seats. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), another major player in Uttar Pradesh politics, for instance, won nearly 20 per cent of the vote share in the 2019 general elections but failed to win a single seat.
The picture could become clearer in terms of ‘leads’ in a particular seat. In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections, the opposition, collectively led in 127 seats in the assembly segments in the state which roughly translate into around 25 Lok Sabha (popularly elected lower chamber of the Indian parliament) constituencies (in Uttar Pradesh, five assembly seats roughly constitute one Lok Sabha seat).
If this logic is followed, the BJP-led NDA will have 55 seats left to win, nearly 10 less than its tally of 64 five years ago. However, the BJP had contested the 2022 election in alliance with only AD (Soneylal) and the NISHAD Party. They have with them the SBSP and RLD this time and if the tally of all the four parties is added, it leads to 287 assembly seats or around 57 parliamentary seats.
While this is all about electoral arithmetic, chemistry also plays a big role in India’s elections. The BJP’s preparations are boosted by factors such as its leadership, organisation and agenda/ideology and the opposition realistically do not look strong enough to match those aspects of the Hindu nationalist party.
The inauguration of the Ram temple by Modi in January has mobilised the BJP’s Hindu voter base even more and the saffron forces are confident of making use of the mood the most. In the middle of this, the Congress-SP alliance looks to be the initial step towards carving out a socio-political space based on an anti-BJP narrative.
The voter base of the BSP of Mayawati could be something the INDI Alliance will look to capitalise on in the upcoming election. But a significant section of that has also felt attracted towards the BJP and the SP-Congress alliance will have a task in their hand to make inroads there. In 2019, the SP and BSP had joined hands in Uttar Pradesh but could manage only 15 seats among them, failing to stop the BJP’s juggernaut.
It will all depend on how effectively the SP-Congress campaigns for the election and how much their messaging mobilises the voters. If they can do that and convince the voters of Uttar Pradesh that they have a better platform to offer than Modi’s BJP, they can at least prevent the BJP from running away with the numbers in Uttar Pradesh and find them at an advantage to form the government for the third consecutive term.
