Until a decade ago, few would have heard of Sanjay Nishad, Mukesh Sahani, Krishna Singh, Om Prakash Rajbhar or for that matter, even Anupriya Patel, currently a Cabinet Minister in the Union government. But today, there is a huge, consuming interest in these leaders, who head a cluster of “small parties” that have come to significantly influence the shaping of U.P.’s political landscape, especially in the Poorvanchal region. The poverty-stricken eastern region goes to the polls in the last two rounds of voting coming up on Thursday and Monday.
In 2017, these less-known parties, which mostly provide representation to the numerically significant non-Dalit most backward castes (MBC), assembled under the giant umbrella of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), helping it ride to a spectacular electoral triumph. Cut to 2022, however, and several of them have switched their support, opting to go instead with the Samajwadi Party (SP) led by Akhilesh Yadav, who has become the most formidable challenger to incumbent Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Forging alliances
Interestingly, over this process of shifting, renegotiations and hard bargains, the smaller parties seem to have leveraged themselves into getting more seats and better deals. In 2017, Anupriya Patel’s Apna Dal (Sonelal) contested 11 seats as an ally of the BJP. This time around, the party of Patel Kurmis — a backward caste with presence across central and eastern U.P. — has fielded candidates for 17 seats. The BJP set aside more seats for its ally, fearing it might otherwise join hands with rival SP. Still, the SP managed to get on its side a breakaway faction of the party led by Anupriya’s mother, Krishna Singh. That faction, the Apna Dal (Kamerawadi), is now contesting six seats as an ally of the SP. In effect, the combined total from both the Apna Dal factions has moved up to 23 in 2022, from 11 in 2017 — a gain of a dozen seats.
Similarly, Om Prakash Rajbhar’s Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), which had contested eight seats as a BJP ally in the previous Assembly polls, has since joined the SP-led alliance and fielded candidates for 18 seats. Mr. Rajbhar’s party has a strong following among the MBCs in areas such as Ambedkar Nagar, Zahoorabad, Ghazipur, Mau and Jaunpur.
To make up for the loss of Mr. Rajbhar, the BJP has roped in the Nishad Party as a new ally in this election. This party claims support among the Nishad community of boatmen, fishermen and over a dozen sub-castes such as Bind, Mallah and Manjhi, whose traditional occupations centre around rivers flowing through the Gangetic belt. Founded by Sanjay Nishad in 2016, the Nishad Party made its electoral debut in 2017 by going solo. Although the party won just one seat, the votes it picked in certain areas persuaded the BJP to leave aside as many as 16 seats for it.
Why are small players able to drive big bargains? How does the tail end up wagging the dog? Politically speaking, what does this all add up to? The aforementioned four parties, with a voter base that may not cross 5% of the State’s total electorate, have managed to field as many 73 candidates in the contest for the 403-member Assembly. If to this mix are added the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Mahan Dal, which are mostly present in western U.P. and have an alliance with the SP, the tally increases to 107 candidates. That is, every eighth contestant from the two major contending alliances taken together belongs to one of these small parties.
Defining impact
In other words, small has indeed become big and powerful in this election. Statistically speaking, though their castes might account for tiny fractional slices within the State’s total electorate, their concentration in specific constituencies can make their impacts defining. That brings us to an important question: why are small parties gaining ground and how might they be shaping the big picture in U.P.’s electoral landscape of 2022?
Most of these smaller outfits are, in fact, offshoots of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which in the 1990s emerged as a rallying point for all such backward castes and classes who felt left out of the post-Mandal political matrix. Both Mr. Rajbhar and Ms. Anupriya’s father, Sonelal Patel, were once close aides of the late Kanshi Ram, the charismatic founder of the BSP. Mr. Sonelal Patel quit the BSP in 1996 and founded the Apna Dal, while Mr. Rajbhar formed his own party in 2002 after a fallout with BSP chief Mayawati.
The Nishad community mostly voted for either the SP or the BSP while following in the footsteps of late Phoolan Devi, the bandit-turned politician who was a Nishad.
In recent years, the BJP has been winning support from this community, which is what prompted Mr. Nishad to form the Nishad Party in 2016.
Clearly, the one consistent pattern that seems to be emerging is the fact that the MBCs and their small parties are acquiring, and maturing in their, political leadership. Not only in terms of developing organisational capacity and assembling patron client networks within their own parties, they are also able to stay messaged on their political and economic demands. While their strengths lie in their peculiar ability to make the winning difference in a specific set of constituencies, they also seem adept at wheeling, dealing and optimising when bargaining with larger formations. Most strikingly, they are parties that define themselves by transactional politics — concessions for votes — and not by any ideological commitments.
Hence, these MBCs will continue to possess the ability to easily plug-in or plug-out from any existing political arrangement. The coming years in U.P. politics, in other words, will be full of relatively stable big ideological formations being repeatedly undercut by the small party’s transactional wheeling and dealing.
(The author is an independent journalist.)
