In the days following the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) stunning victory in Uttar Pradesh, journalists who covered the Assembly polls were asked how they had failed to detect the "Modi wave".
When the results came out and it was clear that Narendra Modi had carried the election, many were quick to conclude that people had once again voted along caste and communal lines. To say that is selling short the UP voter. While it is true political parties campaigned for the 2017 polls along caste and religious lines, there were voters on the ground who refused to play by the rules of identity politics.
When the results came out and it was clear that Narendra Modi had carried the election, many were quick to conclude that people had once again voted along caste and communal lines. To say that is selling short the UP voter. While it is true political parties campaigned for the 2017 polls along caste and religious lines, there were voters on the ground who refused to play by the rules of identity politics.
Consider the following examples.
A Muslim woman from Bareilly, who is a survivor of triple talaq, expressed her support for the BJP. A BJP loyalist conveyed his dissatisfaction with the development work done by the local BJP candidate.
A student in Bundelkhand questioned why Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had not done more to improve the quality of education in his village. A father in Ayodhya held that sidelining Mulayam Singh Yadav was a huge mistake, even as his son voiced his faith in Akhilesh as a youth icon.
There were many who saw through the BJP's attempts at polarisation. They shrugged at some of the offensive utterances by BJP firebrands, such as Sangeet Som and Yogi Adityanath, dismissing their rhetoric as "drama" and reducing the two leaders to caricatures of themselves rather than hailing them as saviours of Hindutva.
For example, the BJP's highlighting the issue of the triple talaq, the tradition of unilateral oral divorce available to Muslim men, was more important to 23-year-old Nida Khan than any anti-Muslim rant like "love jihad" or "ghar wapsi".
The post-graduate student reasoned that Som and Yogi Adityanath said whatever they did because they were playing to a small group of people "who still believed in such things" and that it was "mostly for show."
"If there is Yogi Adityanath on the Hindu side who divides people, do we not have people like [Asaduddin] Owaisi on the Muslim side?" she said. "Has he not spoken against the Hindus? I think it is all said and done just to get votes."
In backing the BJP, Khan had broken her family convention of supporting the Samajwadi Party. It did not bother her that the BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate from UP or that there could be a hidden agenda in the background.
"They know Muslims won't vote for them, so why should they put up such candidates?" she said pragmatically. "I'm supporting them because of [their opposition to ] triple talaq."
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