Uttar Pradesh: SP’s Rajya Sabha Setback Raises Questions Ahead Of Lok Sabha Elections

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory on 10 out of 15 Rajya Sabha seats across Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Karnataka has exposed fractures within the opposition in the lead-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The Rajya Sabha elections witnessed cross-voting within opposition parties, with the Congress losing one seat to the BJP in Himachal, which is the only North Indian state ruled by the party. In UP, the BJP and Samajwadi Party (SP) were to send seven and three members unopposed to the Rajya Sabha respectively, but the BJP’s decision to field an eighth candidate led to a competitive race for one seat. 

The cross-voting by SP members led to the BJP winning eight out of the ten seats and the SP bagging two. About seven SP leaders are believed to have cross-voted, including Manoj Pandey, Rakesh Pandey, Vinod Chaturvedi, Rakesh Pratap Singh, Abhay Singh, Puja Pal, and Ashutosh Maurya.

SP National Spokesperson Ghanshyam Tiwari told Outlook, “The social messaging from this kind of behaviour of certain MLAs has gone across the state, which is that the BJP is able to play their dirty politics on MLAs that belong to certain caste and certain belief systems.”

Tiwari believes that the BJP has been trying to target MLAs who “because of their caste oppose the social justice movement, the PDA (Pichre, Dalit and Alpasankhyak) movement and caste census”.

“There are over 400 MLAs and MPs from different parties who have joined the BJP in the past few years and every party is under siege. Every institution for that matter is under siege. So if a day passes where the BJP doesn’t play out on an institution or a party, it’s a good day for Indian democracy. There are few such days these days,” said Tiwari.

After the Rajya Sabha election results were announced last week, Akhilesh Yadav took to X (formerly Twitter), saying the third seat was a “test”.

“Our third seat in the Rajya Sabha was actually a test to identify the true comrades and to know who was with the PDA at heart and who was against the backward classes, Dalits, and minorities by conscience. Now everything is clear, this is the victory of the third seat,” his social media post read.

“We knew they would rebel when they skipped the dinner [hosted the previous night]. There was a buzz that different packages have been offered. Those part of the mutiny will be expelled,” Yadav told NDTV.

There were speculations that SP’s decision to not attend the Ram Mandir consecration in January had led to discontent among SP members and was one of the reasons for the cross-voting. Rakesh Pratap Singh, who was one of the members involved, had previously written to the Assembly speaker urging all MLAs to attend the consecration. 

Tiwari denied the event as one of the reasons why the MLAs voted for the BJP in the Rajya Sabha elections. 

Tiwari told Outlook, “This did not play into anything that came out in the Rajya Sabha elections. The BJP had turned the event into a purely political event which was even opposed by the shankaracharya. The temple is not complete and no one in the country can dictate terms for anybody about when to go to a temple and not go to a temple. It was the so-called ‘godi media’ along with the BJP that wanted to set an environment that anyone who is not there in that event on that day is not Hindu enough.

“That environment has evaporated. People are now back to talking about real things in their lives like jobs, paper-leak, the kind of blatantly anti-women candidates the BJP is giving tickets to, and the way the BJP is firing on farmers through drones. So these are the issues that have taken centre-stage. I believe that people have forgotten the kind of propaganda the BJP played in January through ‘godi media’ channels to give certificates to people that who is Hindu and who is not.”

The SP has faced significant challenges in recent times, especially with the upcoming general elections around the corner. In February, the Jayant Chaudhary-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which holds a strong position in Western Uttar Pradesh, ended its alliance with the SP and joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The SP has also drawn criticism for its apparent lack of representation of non-Yadav OBCs, Dalits, and Muslims which goes against its PDA pitch. OBC leader Swami Prasad Maurya, who has been vocal against the BJP’s Hindutva politics, argued that his efforts to mobilise Dalits and OBCs were being dismissed as personal opinions and resigned last month.

Additionally, the SP’s negotiations with Congress over seat-sharing underwent several rounds of talks before the deal was sealed. Party leaders Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi then made a joint public appearance during the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Agra, signalling a united front.