Today after the election result, people of Uttar Pradesh proved that they voted not on caste and religion lines, they went above that and voted for the development of their state and country. They preferred honesty and pride for the country not for their own community. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) returned to power in UP with a three-quarter majority after fourteen years. And it is surprising that without fielding any Muslim candidate.
Yesterday the exit polls predicted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would emerge as the single largest party, winning anywhere between 200 and 210 of the 403 seats. And the prediction was more than perfect. Today the BJP has secured a stunning victory in UP Assembly election, after struggling with a fragmented opposition to secure the biggest mandate any party has ever received in the state. The BJP has won 324 out of 403 seats in the assembly, the biggest majority any party has ever received in UP since 1980. And this victory in Uttar Pradesh will boost Modi’s chances of winning the 2019 general elections because it is the home of major voters, almost 220 million people.
The main agenda of SP and BSP was backward castes vote, which is almost 50 percent of UP’s voting population. And the picture was almost same in 2014 election also. It proves that the anti-Congress wave of 2014 organically converted into a Modi Wave in UP in 2017. The BJP’s campaign began in UP assembly polls where it had left off in the general elections of 2014, winning 71 seats out of 80 parliamentary constituencies.
There are many factors, boosted the result. The main factor is its less Hindutva (Hinduism) pitch shrill in the overall political rhetoric during the campaign, learned its lesson from Bihar election. Another one is demonetization. This national issue dominated both the assembly campaign and mass sentiment in Uttar Pradesh. It can be termed as Modinomics. The merits of Modinomics may be debatable, but the results show that his politics has definitely won on this score.
Everywhere in Uttar Pradesh, the SP-BSP was at pains to explain that demonetization was ‘all pain and no gain’. And Modi was trying to explain that the fight was only against corruption and to give the poor its rightful share in India’s growth story. The sense of class revenge demonetization may have boosted their victory in the election of UP.
The BJP has also won the majority in neighboring state Uttarakhand. Mr. Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, congratulated BJP’s victory and described the BJP’s victory in UP as a tsunami, in a series of tweets on the state poll results. He also said “opposition parties should focus their energies towards finding an alternative. At present, there is no leader with pan-India acceptability to take on PM Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2019 general national election.
