LUCKNOW: As Uttar Pradesh gears up for an intense poll battle, the wooing and mobilisation of the
Brahmin
community has assumed the centre stage of politicking and election planning in the country’s most populous state.
Accounting for around 11% of the electorate, Brahmin voters are being tenaciously solicited by all political outfits for electoral gains.
Experts say the Brahmin community is not just a voting class but also considered a ‘propagator’ and ‘influencer’. “It is said that one Brahmin brings along five more people. The community has a pronounced potential to set a narrative which eventually decides the electoral fortunes of any political outfit,” said political expert, Prof Ravi Kant of Lucknow University.
Not surprisingly,
Brahmins
are being wooed wholeheartedly by all parties ahead of elections. BJP has harked back to its trademark Hindutva narrative besides constituting a special committee of Brahmin leaders headed by
Rajya Sabha
MP
Shiv Pratap Shukla to consolidate Brahmin votes at grassroots.
BSP chief Mayawati too has once again unveiled her tried and tested social engineering formula entailing amalgamation of Dalits and upper castes that had catapulted her to power with full majority for the first time in 2007. Mayawati deployed her trusted aide and party’s Brahmin face
SC Mishra
to hold Prabuddha Varg Sammelans to reach out to Brahmins and announced that she would “allow construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya” on coming to power.
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav is also playing soft Hindutva, promising installation of statues of Parshuram in UP, besides invoking Lord
Krishna. The party strengthened its Brahmin outreach strategy in December last year by inducting two sitting Brahmin MLAs — Jai Chaubey from Khalilabad (Sant Kabir Nagar) and
Vinay Shankar Tewari
from Chillupar seat (Gorakhpur). Vinay happens to be the son of Gorakhpur strongman Hari Shankar Tewari, a strong proponent of Brahmin politics.
Not to be left behind, Congress general secretary
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra invoked Goddess Durga at a rally in Varanasi in October and urged the audience to chant ‘Jai Mata Di’ in what was seen as an alluring message to Brahmins.
Experts point out that Brahmins once stood steadfastly behind Congress but drifted sharply towards BJP when the Ram Temple movement peaked.
The saffron party’s withdrawal of support to VP Singh led National Front government, which implemented the Mandal Commission report provisioning reservation for the backward classes in 1990, played the momentous role in further amalgamating the upper castes, ostensibly Brahmins with BJP.
The strong emergence of BSP and SP in the mid-1990s led to BJP heightening the clamor around Ram Temple. The SP-BSP alliance in 1993, in fact, threw up a shrill slogan: “Miley Mulayam Kanshiram, Hawa Mein Ud Gaye Jai Shri Ram.”
The political scene in UP remained tumultuous for the next decade, until 2007 when BSP, headed by Mayawati, successfully experimented the social engineering formula and stormed to power in UP.
“Brahmins were the axis of BSP’s experiment in which the party shrewdly changed its political tenets from being a party of Bahujan to that of Sarvajan. This was soon after BSP founder Kanshiram’s death in 2006,” said Prof Kant.
Experts insist that BJP’s Brahmin vote share has been decreasing consistently since 2002 when it got 50% of the total Brahmin votes. It dipped to 44% in 2007 and subsequently to 38% in 2012. Samajwadi Party won the 2012 election getting 19% of Brahmin votes, while BSP got 19%. The Brahmins went back to BJP in 2017 assembly elections, three years after the saffron party stormed to power at Centre and
Narendra Modi was hoisted into the PM’s chair.