The new handbook to covering the U.P. elections

With a confusing caste alignment emerging, the mediaperson needs to keep an eye on crucial micro-level changes

The morning after Lucknow went to the polls last week, I met a retired railway worker at a tea stall. Buddhu Rai told me how there was a swing in favour of the Samajwadi Party (SP). “Lag raha hai, cycle nikal legi (it looks like cycle will win),” he said, referring to the election symbol of the SP. As observers of the Uttar Pradesh elections of 2022 would tell you, it is largely a bipolar contest between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the Samajwadi Party led by Akhilesh Yadav.

Rai continued without my prompting: “Mehengai, berozgari … log pareshan hai (People are tired of inflation, unemployment …)”, and followed with a sudden pause midway to ask me what I do for a living. The moment I told him I was a journalist from Delhi, his tone changed dramatically. He began to explain how unemployment cannot be blamed on this government and why people should be willing to bear the burden of inflation if that helps the nation’s development. I was confused by now. Was he critical of the BJP or not? Pat came his reply. He was actually trying to make me understand why some people, including him, were still voting for the BJP and why Mr. Adityanath should be the Chief Minister again. Before I could untangle the claims, he got up suddenly and left.

When people do not tell you what they mean, and they do not mean what they tell you, is any meaningful reportage possible? Undoubtedly, there is fear, personal calculation and, often enough, the need to tactically mislead. For journalists from Delhi in particular, who are always short on time, low on patience, deadline driven and prone to see and hear precisely what they are looking for, the Uttar Pradesh election of 2022 is mined with psychological traps. For one, in many cases, the person you are interviewing will most likely assume, unless proven otherwise, that you are with the current ruling establishment. I experienced this on many occasions in my recent travels through Uttar Pradesh, a fact corroborated when comparing notes with many of my journalist friends.

This radical difference between an on-camera version from the off-camera version when dealing with the same person, however, confirms that U.P. voters are not only playing their cards close to their chest but also making it clear that politics is serious business. Voting among the marginalised, in particular, is not simply about them exercising choice. It is also linked to an entire social and economic architecture that will subsequently enable their access to welfare schemes and the local administration. In other words, a journalist has to be extremely attentive about how to read the political changes at the micro-level.

Consequently, voting preferences, the talk around it, the entire web of claims, and even the general electoral noise have made the intensely fought U.P. election to date seeded with the flavours of post-truth; the need to understand a political culture that goes beyond a simple true/false or honesty/lying binary. And it is in such a post-truth context that non-voters and the silent voters might help us better understand the big ongoing churn within U.P.’s politics. A churn or caste realignment that is most certainly happening but not immediately visible to ready-made journalism and the usual observer.

Looking at the constituency-level voter turnout data, we can draw some credible inferences about who is not voting. When the temple city of Ayodhya reported a drop in voter turnout despite a high voltage campaign, the question of who chose not to vote became significant. The needle of suspicion pointed to the BJP voter. Similarly, in Sardhana in western U.P., where the sitting MLA was facing visible disenchantment among his own supporters, voter turnout fell sharply by 4.5 percentage points. In both Ayodhya and Sardhana, the BJP has a tough fight on its hands and if some of its voters are not showing up that could spell bad news for the party. The same seems to be the case with several other constituencies where the BJP voter, by staying away, might actually be making a political statement.

While the no-show voter could play a decisive role in some constituencies, especially if the contest is close, it will be the silent voter who is and will likely make a bigger difference in this election. By silent voter, we mean the socially and the economically marginalised but not politically visible. They include mostly women (especially from the lower economic strata), backward castes which go unrepresented by any political party and non-Jatav Dalits who have been voting for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Although the BSP won only 19 seats in the 403-member State Assembly in 2017, the party polled a formidable 22% share of votes. A sizeable part of such voters often remain well below the noisy campaign radar. This time, with the BSP missing from the contest in most places, these voters will likely choose between the BJP and the SP.