Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his comrade, fundamentalist monk and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath
Starting on 10 February, the giant Indian state of Uttar Pradesh - population over 230 million! - is voting in crucially important state elections, in a major test of how much last year's victorious farmers' struggle has pushed back India's far right. The left and labour movement in the UK should be paying much more attention.
Many farmers’ leaders are vocal about their desire to drive Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government from power. In March 2021 much of the movement’s leadership went to West Bengal, target of a huge BJP campaign, and helped block its takeover attempt in India’s fourth most populous state.
Barring an even more dramatic upheaval, India will not have national elections until 2024. But the five state elections this month, with over one hundred million people likely to take part, will have major wider consequences - and none more so than Uttar Pradesh (UP).
The UP elections in particular were surely central to why Modi’s government retreated on the farm laws in November.
If the BJP loses control of this stronghold, its position will be much weakened. There will likely be a better environment for the farmers’ movement, workers’ movement and other struggles to push forward with demands; and potentially enormous wider consequences, across India and far beyond.
Uttar Pradesh
Different parts of Uttar Pradesh (“Northern Province”), in the middle of northern India, will vote in seven phases: the first on 10 February and the last on 7 March, with the votes counted on 10 March.
If UP was independent it would be the fifth largest country, bigger than Pakistan and Brazil.
The state is important for a range of reasons in addition to its massive size – though its size certainly makes it important for winning power nationally. 80 of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly – the lower house of India’s parliament) are in UP. In 2019 the BJP won 62.
UP plays a very important role in India’s agriculture, eg accounting for 19% of the country’s food grain production. Its western areas played a very important role in last year's farmers' movement.
Farm struggles, caste politics and Hindu nationalism
UP has a long tradition of “radical” – though generally not anti-capitalist – farmer politics, emblematised by peasant-background, land-reforming late 60s chief minister and later briefly Indian prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh. Such politics cut across and weakened communal divisions, uniting Hindus and Muslims. Today just under 20% of UP’s people are Muslim or of Muslim background, significantly more than across India, and just under 80% Hindu.
In the late 1980s, as the small-to-middle farmer-oriented political movement Charan Singh had led weakened, farmers’ unions became increasingly important. The Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union, BKU), which was central in the recent struggle, led many mobilisations over issues including higher prices for crops and the cost of electricity. It involved not only farmers of different sizes but landless labourers, and for a period strengthened Hindu-Muslim cooperation.
Hindu nationalism, rising from the 80s, has worked to destroy this political culture. The BJP surged in the 1991 state election; and in 1992 UP became the centre of nationwide communal clashes in which thousands died, after far-right Hindu activists tore down a 16th century mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya. (The destruction was illegal, but Hindu organisations, including those who initiated the destruction, have since been granted most of the land by the courts.)
That was UP Hindutva’s first big wave. Lower-caste political assertion, partly as a result of farm unions’ struggles, helped create a different dynamic, and in the early 21st century UP politics was dominated by two leftish or left-talking parties – the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party, SP), which is now very mildly social democratic, politically corrupt and socially conservative; and the Bahujan Samaj Party (Majority Society Party, BSP) claiming to represent the state’s Dalits (the lowest, most oppressed caste) in particular. The BSP won the 2007 state elections; the SP won in 2012. In 2012, the SP got over 29% of the vote, the BSP almost 26% and the BJP 15%, falling for the fifth election in a row.
The Hindu right uprising
From 2013, the year before Modi first won power nationally, new Hindu nationalist mobilisations to create communal division and polarisation changed the dynamic again.
In August-September 2013, Muzaffarnagar, in the western heartland of the farmers’ movement, saw communal violence – supposedly sparked either by a traffic incident or an episode of sexual harassment – which left 62 dead, 42 Muslim and 20 Hindu, injured close to a hundred and displaced 50,000. Many poor Muslim farmers, artisans and labourers fled.
The Hindu right reaped the harvest. In the 2017 state elections the BJP surged, leaping from 47 to 312 seats out of 403. Several lower-to-middle-caste Hindu groups prominently represented among farmers swung heavily to it. However it is worth noting that, while the BJP vote increased from 15% to just under 40%, the combined SP-BSP total was still over 44% (with Congress and left parties, well over 50%). As nationally in 2014 and '19, the BJP benefited hugely from first-past-the-post.
The state’s chief minister since then has been a monstrous figure, a Hindu fundamentalist monk born Ajay Mohan Bisht but styling himself Yogi Adityanath. Adityanath has repeatedly found himself in conflict with the national BJP leadership, essentially because he regards them as insufficiently zealous and right-wing. His regime has been in the vanguard of both Hindu nationalism’s religious fundamentalist and sectarian drives – including campaigns and laws to discourage inter-religious marriages and special police “anti-Romeo squads” to harass young couples – and its neoliberal ones – including using the pandemic to exempt employers from almost all labour laws.
A flavour of the situation in Uttar Pradesh is given by the 12 journalists killed, 48 assaulted and 66 arrested since the BJP came to power, most of them in the last two years.
Is the tide turning?
Adityanath and the BJP have been knocked by issues including their government’s disastrous handling of the pandemic; high crimes rates including rising attacks against Dalits and non-Hindus; lack of safety for women “despite” the Hindu right’s moralistic and communalist campaigns; and a dire social and economic situation including desperate youth unemployment. India's youth unemployment rate is 25%.
In 2019-20 UP was one of the centres of youth-driven protests against the Modi government's anti-Muslim changes to citizenship law, as well unemployment, inequality and other issues.
The BJP has appealed strongly to Hindu chauvinist and anti-Muslim narratives to shore up its support. Adityanath has led agitation presenting the 2013 clashes as primarily persecution of Hindus, alongside all manner of other anti-Muslim themes used by the BJP nationwide. He has said those who oppose the BJP "love Pakistan" and openly called it an “80 vs 20” election (ie Hindu vs Muslim).
Campaigning in UP, Modi's home minister Amit Shah spoke about “Mughal invaders”, strongly suggesting Muslims are an alien presence in India that should be driven out.
Naturally none of the BJP’s candidates are Muslim (quite a lot of the SP's and BSP's are). With the BJP takeover of the state assembly in 2017 the proportion of Muslim members fell from 17% to 6%. This in a state - and a country - in which Muslim-background people suffer systematic discrimination and disadvantage.
Coming in the midst of the wider social crisis, the farmers’ struggle has disrupted the BJP's communalist strategy and put it on the back foot. In the west of UP in particular the movement organised many mass meetings in which both Hindu and Muslim farmers and labourers participated, and as well as denouncing the BJP farm union leaders used slogans from both religions to encourage cross-communal unity. It is widely reported that the social and political “atmosphere” in villages in the west of the state has changed significantly from five years ago.
The farmers' movement
UP was also the site of a possibly decisive turning point in the farm laws struggle. In October four farmers and a journalist were killed and ten injured when a convoy of cars rammed into a protest in the northern district of Lakhimpur Kheri. Two of the cars belonged to local MP and national home affairs minister Ajay Mishra Teni, and his son was in one of them.
The farmers’ movement made Mishra’s resignation a central demand; this is the only point on which Modi has made no concessions. However these events were a propaganda disaster for the BJP, sharpening the bitterness generated by hundreds of protesters’ deaths and the nationalist propaganda offensive against the farmers’ movement. By the time of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident the farmers had been in struggle for over ten months; Modi announced the withdrawal of the farm laws six weeks later.
Probably the most prominent national leader of the farmers’ movement is Muzaffarnagar-born Rakesh Tikait, national spokesperson for the BKU. A politically ambiguous figure who before 2020 aided the BJP, he now denounces its treatment of the farmers virulently, its neo-liberal economic policies strongly and its communal agitation more hesitantly. He is popular among the middling farmer social groups that previously swung strongly to the BJP, and now much more widely too.
Leaders of the BKU and the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (United Farmers’ Front, SKM: the national coalition of over forty farmers’ organisations that led last year’s struggle) have flipflopped on what if anything they are calling for in the UP vote. But on 4 February Tikait issued social media posts using the slogan #novotetobjp and appealing to farmers in UP and the neighbouring much smaller state of Uttarakhand: “We need your support to teach the BJP which insults the farmers”.
Tikait said the SKM would be holding pre-election events across UP. His intervention is regarded by many as an important last-minute setback for the BJP.
What will happen?
The polls suggest that the main rival to the BJP is a coalition of the Samajwadi Party with seven smaller organisations including Rashtriya Lok Dal (National People’s Battalion), the political descendant of Charan Singh’s farmer-based political movement. The Bahujan Samaj Party is standing by itself; there is also a more radical Dalit-based party emerging out of recent Dalit mobilisations, Azad Samaj (Free Society). The liberal / neo-liberal Indian National Congress, the main national opposition party but weak in UP (Indian politics is highly regionalised), is also standing by itself. There is a “Left Front” coalition of four Stalinist / social-democratic parties, unlikely to make much of an impact.
If the SP’s coalition wins, 2012-2017 chief minister Akhilesh Yadav will return. This is not in itself cause for celebration; the “socialist” SP is a conservative political machine. However it would be a sharp blow for the Hindu right and give heart to those fighting it.
The polls suggest the BJP will probably lose seats but hold on, though they had tightened considerably even before Tikait’s intervention. What exactly Marxists in Uttar Pradesh should advocate in the election I don’t know – but I am keeping everything crossed!
• This is mostly taken from a longer article which also discusses the elections in Punjab, the centre of the farmers' uprising.
