Lucknow: Being the vast and hugely-populated state that it is, Uttar Pradesh is set for an election process spanning 73 days from the day the Election Commission announced the Lok Sabha election schedule. UP is among the three states – Bihar and West Bengal being the others – where the polling is spread over seven phases, meaning that by the time the country gets a new government, the people in UP will be deep in election fatigue.
The number of phases for general election in UP has been rising since 2004. Voting was held in four phases in 2004, five phases in 2009, six phases in 2014, and it is scheduled for seven phases this year. The voting was spread 20 days in 2004, 27 days in 2009 and 32 days in 2014. This time, it is spread over 38 summer days – from April 11 to May 18. The sequence of constituencies, too, has been similar in previous elections.
Constituencies of western UP have featured in earlier phases, followed by those in central or Awadh region and Bundelkhand, and constituencies in eastern UP figure in the last phase. This is done to facilitate the movement of Central paramilitary forces and other paraphernalia from one direction to the other, and for other operational reasons.
The announcement was being expected for the past more than a week, and the schedule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s programmes and rallies was an indication as to when it would have been made. Modi had a programme scheduled in Noida and Greater Noida on March 9, preceded by a busy schedule in Kanpur and Varanasi a day earlier. He has been campaigning for his party on the twin planks of national security and so-called failures of the previous government. However, the opposition parties are yet to put their act together with the Congress locking horns with the Samajwadi Party over their mutual participation in the grand alliance.
The opposition parties, predictably, expected the announcement to have been made much earlier and their preparations so far indicate as much. The SP has released a list of nine candidates, comprising names of Mulayam Singh Yadav, his family members Dimple Yadav, Dharmendra Yadav, Akshay Yadav, and some others, while the Congress has released 11 names for the state.
The Congress list includes no surprises as it includes Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Salman Khurshid, RPN Singh, Nirmal Khatri, Salim Sherwani and Imran Masood. The announcement of names has led to a war of words between the two parties, with the SP claiming that it had left two seats for the Congress (Rae Bareli and Amethi) and therefore the Congress was a part of the Mahagathbandhan. The Congress retorted by saying that it was going to contest most seats in UP and will leave out two or three seats for the SP. Obviously all is still not well on the question of seat sharing between the two parties even as a desire to go together against the BJP is pretty obvious.
The multi-phase election would require sustained, continuous campaigning spread over more than a month. This is going to be a tough and tiring task for most party leaders and they would have preferred a more compact schedule, although most leaders are reluctant to react openly. Election issues will have to be kept alive for more than a month and it remains to be seen how long issues like nationalism on one hand, and unemployment, farmer distress on the other can be stretched to sway voters.
The BJP has not released any names so far and things are expected to happen quickly over the next one week. For the eight constituencies where voting is scheduled in the first phase on April 11, the time left for campaigning is less than three weeks since the date of notification for this phase is March 18, and the date of withdrawals is March 28.
These constituencies are Saharanpur, Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnore, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddh Nagar, and all had been won by the BJP in the 2014 general election. However, the BJP had lost Kairana to the SP in the 2018 by-election. Communal polarisation has been an important part of campaigning in these areas and it is likely to be so this time also.
