'Can't Turn Blind Eye': Political Challenges Loom Ahead of Yogi Gov't in Uttar Pradesh - Analyst

In the 2017 state assembly polls in India’s Uttar Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) registered a massive victory by winning 312 of 403 seats, with Yogi Adityanath being made state chief.

The Bharatiya Janata Party recently became the first political party in 37 years to win consecutive state assembly polls in India’s Uttar Pradesh, with Yogi Adityanath staying on as the state chief.

The BJP won 255 of the 403 assembly seats this time. After its historic triumph, the Yogi Adityanath-led state government embarked on its second term on 25 March.

The monk-politician took the oath of office along with 52 other ministers, many of them new faces in the Cabinet.

The party and its members, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and state chief Adityanath, are believed to claim that the victory is the result of good governance and a timely delivery of the promises made to the people of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India.

The win, however, comes amid fierce attacks by opposition parties over inflation, increasing unemployment, mismanagement during the COVID outbreak, farmers’ protests, and several other issues.

However, the BJP never seemed to be deterred by the attacks and in all the electoral campaigns, it promoted the welfare schemes rolled out by the federal government. It aggressively touted the free ration scheme, which has benefited many people.

But despite its historic victory, Adityanath’s second term may not be a smooth ride in the days to come. The public mandate leaves no room for complacency for the new government, as the second term involves various new challenges for state chief Adityanath.

According to political analyst Vinod Shukla, the massive mandate despite being incumbent shows that the people of the state were happy with the administration during the first tenure of the BJP government.

"Therefore, I don’t see any challenge on the administrative front but there will be political challenges”, he told Sputnik.

Shukla highlighted such political issues as a resurgent main opposition, the Samajwadi Party (SP), the polarisation of Muslim votes, and managing voters from castes who didn’t vote in favour of the BJP.

Shukla said this time that the opposition, especially the SP, has become stronger in the state assembly than it was in the previous five years.

"[The] Samajwadi Party has grown from 47 to 111, whereas BJP’s strength has reduced to 255 from 312 as compared to the last elections. Therefore, the BJP has to deal with a stronger opposition for the next five years”, he stated.

Stating the reasons behind the increased strength of the SP, the political analyst said that it happened because "earlier the Muslim votes which were divided among Congress, Samajwadi Party, [the] Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and others, have now moved towards [the] Samajwadi Party".

The results of the state assembly polls also show that the politics in Uttar Pradesh is now bi-polar.

The decline of the BSP and Congress has also benefited the state's main opposition party, the SP. This is evident from the increase in the vote share.

The SP's share of votes rose from 21.82 percent in 2017 to 32.06 percent in 2022. But the BJP's vote share witnessed an uptick of a mere 1.6 percent (from 39.67 percent in 2017 to 41.29 percent in 2022).

Opposition parties are likely to put pressure on the Yogi government in the state assembly as former state and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is now leading it from the front. He recently resigned from his parliamentary seat and decided to be the leader of the opposition in the state assembly.

Yadav has been keeping his family members out of politics, depriving the BJP of the chance to slam him or his party for promoting nepotism in the future.

Echoing the views of Shukla, another political analyst, Sanjeev Kaushik, also said that the BJP will have to significantly focus on political challenges, noting that it can’t turn a blind eye toward issues that were neglected during previous elections.

“The issues like rising inflation, unemployment, [the] stray cattle menace and a few others will keep haunting the BJP till the 2024 Parliamentary elections ... Though the issue of inflation is not much state-related, the other issues will have to be addressed in order to improve the performance in 2024 [parliamentary elections]”, Kaushik stated.

He said that the BJP's free ration scheme helped it a lot in securing a comfortable victory in Uttar Pradesh, but with the pandemic waning "this won’t be sufficient and the clamour for jobs will increase".

“Apart from this, the party had pitched the development done by the 'double engine' government of Modi and Yogi too aggressively. But the fact is that the state still lags behind in industrialisation", he pointed out.

Kaushik said the state has not been able to draw major investors in the last five years and it will have to do this "on a priority to build a job creation ecosystem".

He also emphasised that despite new expressways, airports, and several other infrastructure development projects, the "twin" government will have to "reinvent itself to think of more development activities to impress the people".

Both political analysts believe that if the BJP is able to address these challenges, the chances are high that it will fare better in the 2024 parliamentary elections.

Uttar Pradesh is the most important state for the BJP, as it contributed significantly to the party’s seat tally in the 2014 parliamentary elections (73 of the 80 seats for BJP and its allies) and 64 of the 80 seats in the 2019 polls. This impact makes it a formidable force to help gain a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament.