The Uttar Pradesh panchayat elections, were touted as the semi-final of the assembly election due early next year (in Feb-March 2022). The poor performance of the party in panchayat elections have set the alarm bell ringing at top leadership.
The Samajwadi Party emerged as the single largest entity in the panchayat elections. The SP won 782 of the 3,050 zilla panchayat seats in the state, while the ruling BJP came second after winning 580 seats. BSP, another key player in the state, secured 336 seats.
Uttar Pradesh held panchayat polls in four phases ending April 29. The election was held at four levels of panchayat bodies — gram panchayat, gram pradhan, block panchayat and zila panchayat.
Though the panchayat polls are not contested on party symbols, yet all the parties manage candidate selection and election campaigns in a centralised manner .
For BJP, the severest shock was that it stumbled in key districts of Ayodhya and Varanasi. The BJP won just six of 40 district panchayat seats in Ayodhya. The Samajwadi Party won 24 seats in Ayodhya, where the BJP’s pet project of Ram temple construction began last year. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won just five.
In Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP could win only seven of 40 district panchayat seats. The Samajwadi Party won 15 of these seats in Varanasi.
There are 3,050 district-level panchayat wards. BJP even failed to take a psychological advantage over the Samajwadi Party in Mainpuri zila panchayat election, where it roped in Sandhya Yadav, the niece of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. Sandhya Yadav was defeated by SP's Pramod Yadav.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) too claimed big wins in the Uttar Pradesh panchayat election. The party’s Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said 70 candidates backed by the AAP were elected as zila panchayat members. Over 200 AAP members bagged village pradhan posts, he claimed.
Concerned over results of panchayat polls in U.P., the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah held a meeting on Sunday evening of the BJP and its ideological mentor Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to discuss the impact of the Covid crisis on the image of the party and its fallout on state polls next year.
BJP chief JP Nadda, RSS leader Dattatreya Hosbole and Uttar Pradesh's organisational in-charge Sunil Bansal were also in the meeting, which reflects deep worry "at the highest level" of the BJP and the RSS over the impact of the pandemic on public perceptions.
The ruling party is concerned about fierce criticism directed at PM Modi and the government over the deadly second surge of Covid, which caught the country off guard and exposed the ill-preparedness of its health system, with oxygen, medicines, hospitals beds and vaccines falling short.
Uttar Pradesh is among the worst-hit states, where dead bodies of corona victims were spotted floating in the Ganga river and dead Hindus had to be buried . All this became a defining image in the Covid death spiral. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's government faced criticism on its handling of pandemic and its figures on testing and cases were questioned. Yogi govt was found concealing the truth.
UP is mot important for the party to retain power . It sends highest number of MPs (80) to Lak Sabha. BJP's nervousness is linked to its recent disappointing performance in West Bengal, where despite all its resources, top leaders and enviable poll machinery, it failed to stop Mamata Banerjee's third straight victory. And if UP slips out of its hand, party will lose two biggest states. It had already lost second biggest state Maharashtra to NCP-Congress-Shiv Sena alliance and Tamil Nadi to DMK-Cong alliance.
(Chander Sharma)
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