Recapturing the brahmin vote bank from BSP,SP:Congress tokenism or tactic
UP July 15:The Congress broke tradition and named senior leader Sheila Dikshit as its chief ministerial candidate for the upcoming UP polls.
One of the reasons that went in her favour was Sheila Dikshit’s caste . Her marriage into a reputed Brahmin family in Uttar Pradesh will help lure back upper caste voters once loyal to the Congress.
BSP president Mayawati has been consistently wooing Brahmins since 2007, when her social engineering formula helped her storm to power with absolute majority.
In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, she relied heavily on the community by giving 21 out of 80 tickets to Brahmin candidates.
Comprising 11% of the total vote bank, Brahmins had traditionally sided with Congress until Mandal and Ram mandir movement made the community move to the BJP camp.
Dikshit, who has wasted no time in declaring herself as the “bahu” of the state, will appeal to Khatris and Brahmins, two key communities in UP politics.
The ruling SP has a strong claim over the Yadav and Muslim votes while BSP’s Dalit votebank remains secure.
Sensing that it has little support among the backward castes, Congress hopes to wean away a chunk of the Brahmin votes from BJP and hopes that it will also get support from the Muslim community which may vote tactically to keep the BJP away.
Samajwadi Party won the 2012 election getting 19% of Brahmin votes while BSP got another 19%. Experts claim it is this shift of Brahmin vote that Congress is eyeing.
In 2009 Lok Sabha polls, when Congress won 21 seats, the party managed to get sizeable Brahmin support.
Similarly, the Samajwadi Party in 2012 wooed Brahmins in a big way, creating the impression that they were shifting from Mayawati to Akhilesh Yadav.
After winning just 20 seats in that election, the BSP feared losing its core Dalit base.
To stop alienating her Dalit voter base,Mayawati allowed, after 2009, Dalits to register larger number of cases under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities Act).
She also started to help some Dalits regain land that they had titles for, but was illegally occupied by upper castes.
These small measures alienated upper castes, especially Brahmins, who found it important to put their weight behind the Samajwadi Party to make sure there was no ambiguity about Mayawati losing.
In this process, while the BJP still retained the largest chunk of the Brahmin vote, that share kept declining.
Brahmins in UP have a simple problem with the BJP.
After Atal Behari Vajpayee’s exit from the political scene, the BJP has not been able to give them a Brahmin leader of high stature.
So it is left to the congress to capitalize on the upper caste voters.
Political commentator J P Shukla said Congress bringing in a Brahmin face may just be a case of `tokenism’.
“UP’s political scenario changed dramatically after 1989 when no Brahmin leader could become a chief minister (Narayan Dutt Tiwari of Congress was the last Brahmin CM of UP),” he said, adding that Congress could not associate itself with any caste or community after the rise of Mulayam and Mayawati whose politics is centred around OBCs and Dalits, respectively.
