Lucknow: As political parties formulate new strategies in the build-up to the electoral battle, the fight for the prestigious seat of Lucknow has caught attention. The constituency, represented in Parliament by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and currently held by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, has been a Bharatiya Janata Party bastion since 1991.
But the road ahead might be tougher for the BJP as the opposition Congress is likely to field former Union minister Jitin Prasada. Sources say that Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress in-charge for eastern Uttar Pradesh, came up with the idea to shift Prasada from his current constituency of Dhaurahra. According to analysis, the party may have correctly assessed the situation.
Prasada, a Brahmin, hails from a prominent political family from Shahjahanpur. His father, the late Jitendra Prasada, was a Congress stalwart and had even contested the party presidential election against Sonia Gandhi.
The son won his first Lok Sabha election from Shahjahanpur in 2004. In the next elections in 2009, he shifted to the newly-formed Dhaurahra constituency and won. In 2014, he lost to the BJP.
Dhaurahra is one of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state that will go to polls in seven phases, starting April 11. While the Congress has declared Prasada as its official candidate from Dhaurahra, reliable sources close to the leader say the party now wants to shift him to Lucknow. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is the AICC general secretary for both constituencies, has reportedly endorsed the idea.
“Jitin Prasada will go by the party’s decision. He will contest from the seat decided by the party high command,” a highly reliable source told News18.
It remains to be seen why Congress wants to shift Prasada away from the constituency he nurtured. The answer could lie in the larger caste arithmetic, which may benefit the party more if it were to field a well-established Brahmin face from the state capital.
The move will also serve Congress’s larger purpose of sending across a message of promoting Brahmin leadership within the party and trying to attract an upper caste vote-bank.
The Lucknow parliamentary constituency has approximately 19 lakh voters. The upper caste has a 33% vote share — Brahmins alone account for 14.5% of this. Other Backward Castes make up around 19% of the population, Muslims 17%, Scheduled Castes 13% and the Most Backward Castes around 10%.
Congress candidate Reeta Bahuguna Joshi, now with the BJP, had finished runner-up from Lucknow in 2014, securing around 2,88,000 votes with a vote share of 26%. The candidates put up by the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, who polled less than one lakh votes each, were unable to even save their deposits. In the 2009 elections, the Congress had finished as the runner-up as well.
More than 26% of the voters in Dhaurahra come from a Dalit background -- the Jatavs and Chamars make up approximately 11% of this and the non-Jatav segments around 15%. OBCs make up 22% of the population, Muslims 13% and Brahmins 12%.
According to political observers, the constituency’s demography does not make it a feasible seat for the Congress. Prasada’s victory in the 2009 elections can be credited to the momentum the Congress enjoyed in those years following the announcement to waive off farmers’ loans in 2008. Adding to the momentum was the fact that the BJP was in a considerably weaker position and the SP and the BSP were fighting separately.
The SP-BSP alliance in the state this time has rewritten the equation, with its strong arithmetic around Dalit-backward classes-Muslim voters. This has made the Congress’s path in Dhaurahra more difficult as even the BJP has made considerable inroads since. This time around, it will mostly bank on larger Hindu polarisation and managing other vote-banks.
The Congress under Priyanka Gandhi is attempting to work on the MBC, non-Yadav, non-Kurmi castes and Dalit section of the vote-bank – a task that will take considerable time to yield results. Gandhi’s recent Ganga yatra aimed to address the MBC population that is generally not strongly affiliated to any single political party.
A senior Congress leader, on the condition of anonymity, said both Dhaurahra and Lucknow would be a tough contest. “In the face of the SP-BSP alliance and an aggressive and a strong cadre-based BJP, both the seats are extremely tough for us,” said the leader. “But Lucknow gives the party the scope to play out larger politics. The party was in search for a well-known Brahmin face from there. Who better than Jitin for the job?”
The understanding within the party is that a popular Brahmin face from Lucknow will attract a large section of upper caste voters. The party feels that a leader like Prasada might even be able to pull a significant number of upwardly mobile, non-casteist, working-class youth from an urban centre such as Lucknow.
Sources say the party’s top leadership is exploring possibilities of working out an understanding with the SP-BSP alliance to field a suitable candidate in Lucknow and in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency. If the parties manage to strike up a deal, Rajnath Singh will face a challenging hurdle.
The Congress may not be able to finish off its competition by fielding Jitin Prasada from Lucknow. But this political game plan may work for the party in the long term, by playing an important Brahmin card and cornering a BJP stalwart like Singh in his bastion.
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