Akhilesh’s PDA formula vs BJP’s OBC bid: Breaking down the Uttar Pradesh by-elections
The banner outside the election office of Mithlesh Pal, a candidate in the Meerapur assembly in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, featured some unusual faces. Besides the faces of the leaders of Pal’s party, the Rashtriya Lok Dal, and those of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its alliance partner, the banner featured other icons and leaders—BR Ambedkar; the poet Valmiki; Vishwakarma, the architect of the world in Hindu mythology; Jyotiba Phule, the anti-caste social reformer; among others. Pal hails from the Gadariya community, which is classified among the thousands of non-dominant castes among the Other Backward Classes that are collectively referred to as the Extremely Backward Classes. Her banner was honouring the icons of EBC communities such as hers.
Pal’s choice of icons was also an indication of the BJP’s strategy to woo the EBCs, which form the largest voting bloc in the state. Starting in 2017, the party had begun focussing on gaining traction among OBCs, bringing in candidates from EBC groups and honouring their icons or gods. This approach had yielded massive dividends in the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections as well as in the 2019 general election, even though key posts, and power, remained with upper-castes. But in the Lok Sabha elections held earlier this year, the Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s “PDA” strategy—referring to “Piccdhe,” or backward classes, Dalits, and “Alpsankhayak,” or minorities, dented the BJP’s hold. The PDA formula had led the SP to its largest-ever haul of 37 seats in the Lok Sabha. Of the 37 MPs that the SP sent to the Lok Sabha in June, 25 were from OBC communities.
Meerapur is one of the assemblies of Uttar Pradesh to go to by-elections on 20 November. Ninety candidates are contesting, across nine assemblies: Katehari in the Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha constituency, Majhawan in Mirzapur, Meerapur in Bijnor, Sisamau in Kanpur City, Karhal in Mainpuri, Khair in Aligarh, Kundarki in Moradabad, and Phulpur as well as Ghaziabad assembly, in Lok Sabha constituencies of the same names. Eight of these seats fell vacant after the MLAs were elected as MPs in the Lok Sabha elections, while the Sisamau seat became vacant after the Samajwadi Party MLA, Irfan Solanki, was convicted in a criminal case.
Halfway into the second term of the Adityanath government in the state, and following a loss of face for the BJP there in the recent Lok Sabha election, all parties are viewing these by-polls as crucial to building momentum for the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, to be held in 2027. The by-elections are a litmus test of Adityanath’s leadership, which was called into question after the BJP’s dismal performance in the general election. But they are also a test of the BJP’s overtures to the EBCs against Akhilesh’s PDA formula, which has stayed in place in the by-polls.
The BJP has fielded its candidates on eight out of nine assembly seats, with four OBCs among its candidates. It left one seat for its ally, the RLD. In keeping with its PDA formula, the SP has nominated Muslim candidates on four out of nine seats, Dalit candidates on two seats and OBC candidates on three seats. Its Muslim candidates are Naseem Solanki from Sisamau, the former MLAs Mujtuba Siddiqui and Mohammad Rizwan from Phulpur and Kundarki, respectively; and Sumbul Rana from Meerapur. The party has fielded Jyoti Bind from Majhawan and Charu Kain from Khair. Bind hails from an EBC community, and Kain from the Jatav community, which is dominant among Dalits. The Congress party—the SP’s ally in the national opposition bloc, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance—is supporting the party on all seats. Having usually sat out past by-polls, the Bahujan Samaj Party is also entering the fray.
In the Katehari seat, the BJP has fielded Dharm Raj Nishad against the Samajwadi Party’s Shobhawati Verma. Nishad hails from an EBC community, while Verma hails from the Kurmi community, a dominant OBC caste. The seat had become vacant after the resignation of Lalji Verma, the elected MP from the Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha constituency, under which Katehari falls. Both Nishad and Verma have been ministers in BSP governments in Uttar Pradesh. Katehari was once the party’s stronghold, but Verma and another BSP leader, Ram Achal Rajbhar, joined the SP, increasing its influence in the region.
“The main contest is between the SP and the BJP,” Ashutosh Verma, a resident of the Katehari assembly, told us. “Both have fielded a person from a backward community as their candidate,” he said. “Here, votes are cast on the basis of caste only. People take the name of the party second.”
Perhaps the most interesting contest in the by-elections is in the Majhawan assembly seat. At stake is the credibility of the union minister Anupriya Patel—three-time consecutive MP from the Mirzapur Lok Sabha constituency, under which Majhawan falls, and the head of the Apna Dal (Soneylal) party, the BJP’s alliance partner. In 2022, the seat had gone to the BJP’s ally, the the Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal, or NISHAD party, which had won by a wide margin. This time, the national party has given its ticket to the former MLA Suchismita Maurya, who hails from a dominant OBC community. Facing her is Jyoti Bind, the daughter of senior SP leader Ramesh Bind, who hails from an EBC community. Ramesh himself had won the election from this seat three times in a row, in 2002, 2007 and 2012, but lost to Maurya in 2017. Anupriya and her husband, the state cabinet minister Ashish Patel, have been campaigning furiously for Maurya.
“This by-election in Majhawan is a battle of prestige between two parties and two candidates,” Harishchandra Kewat, a journalist who lives in this assembly constituency, said. He explained the demographics. “If we review the caste equation of Majhawan, there are 3,85,000 voters here.” Kewat put the number of Binds and Dalits at around seventy thousand each, closely followed by Brahmins, at around sixty-five thousand. Mauryas make up about forty thousand voters, while there are more than twenty thousand Pals and Yadavs, and around twenty thousand Rajputs and Patels. “It is clear from the caste equation that Bind, Brahmin and Dalit voters play an important role in the victory and defeat in Majhawan, but voters of other castes also have the ability to cause a big upset,” he said.
Kewat felt that the PDA formula of the Samajwadi Party is more likely to be successful in Majhawan because the numbers of and the problems faced by the EBCs, Dalit and minorities are comparable. Most of the villages inhabited by backward and Dalits still lack basic facilities and the last two BJP MLAs did not do much. “A large number of women from Dalit and backward families in Majhawan are farm labourers,” he said. “This time two women candidates are in the fray, so women’s participation in the election will be given prominence.”
Phulpur is the one of three assembly seats from the Purvanchal region, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, going to by-polls. In Phulpur, the contest is between Mujtuba Siddiqui of the SP, Deepak Patel of the BJP and Suresh Chand Yadav, who is contesting as an independent after the Congress issued a notice to him for filing a nomination against an INDIA ally. The BSP has nominated Jitendra Singh, a Thakur.
“Here the number of Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits is high,” Mulayam Singh Yadav, a resident of Amarsapur village in the assembly, told us. He estimated that Phulpur had close to twenty-five thousand upper-caste voters, significantly lower than the numbers of OBCs. He said that Kurmis, a dominant OBC community, made up about thirty-five thousand voters, and Mauryas about fifteen thousand. The EBC communities in Phulpur—Nishad, Kumhar, Nai—“are still with BJP,” Yadav said. “The BJP always gives tickets to OBCs because it does not have the courage to field any upper-caste candidate from here. Be it Lok Sabha or Vidhan Sabha, the entire atmosphere is of ‘PDA.’”
The Ghaziabad seat, adjacent to Delhi, has often been a starting point for the BJP’s campaign in the state, seeing energetic campaigning by all parties. But the by-polls did not have the same fanfare, although the contest was more heated than usual—14 candidates are in the fray, the most of any seat in the by-polls. “There is a bit of silence in this election. The public is also not taking it the way it takes the general elections,” Raman Gautam, a resident of the Ghaziabad assembly seat, said. The largest constituency in Ghaziabad is the Jatav community, followed closely by Muslims. The BJP has fielded Sanjeev Sharma, a Brahmin, while the SP has nominated Singh Raj Jatav, who is Dalit.
“The BJP has its own core vote bank in the city,” Gautam said. “But Akhilesh Yadav has surprised everyone here by giving ticket to a person from the Jatav community. In by-elections, the ruling party often wins the election, but this time it does not seem so. This time the equations seem to have changed.”
“This time this seat is not one-sided like the previous elections,” Rahul Snehli, who runs a coaching centre at the old bus stand in Ghaziabad, said. “Many big leaders have come here. Even after this, they are not able to bring any life into this election. This time it seems that BJP is trying to protect its honour. It is not able to understand the mood of the public. The public is silent.”
But Suresh Kashyap, a BJP leader and a former member of the legislative council, claimed that Ghaziabad was a stronghold of BJP and would remain so. “The number of Jatav community members is the highest here. The BJP has assigned the duty of its leaders from this community to bring its communities together,” he said. “Wherever we have a Muslim candidate, our party does not face any problem,” he said. Kashyap said that the party had a clear understanding of the demographics in Ghaziabad, and otherwise. He referred to the icons that Pal had given space to in her poster—Ambedkar, Vishwakarma, Valmiki, Jyotiba Phule, among others. “She knows who our core voters are. All the above are heroes of the extremely backward society. The Valmiki, Kashyap, Prajapati, Saini and Pal communities have around one lakh votes [in Meerapur].”
Meerapur also has a significant number of Muslims. Taufiq, a resident of Kawal village, felt that the contest between the SP’s Sumbul Rana and Pal would divide the Muslim votes, making it a tough battle for the SP. “We had earlier voted for Chandan Chauhan,” he said. Chauhan is in the RLD, and was the MLA from Meerapur when the SP and the RLD were in alliance—Chauhan’s family had been elected from the seat for three generations before him. But after a long-time alliance with the SP, the RLD had entered an alliance with the BJP in recent years. Taufiq felt betrayed by this shift. “We feel that our vote has no value,” he said.
Near the Meerapur police station, we visited a neighbourhood with primarily Dalit residents. A large statue of Ambedkar stood in the middle of the colony, and a group of about ten young men sat under it. The young men noted the absence of the BSP, and of any parties focussed on the welfare of Dalits. “So far neither anyone from Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram)”—an Ambedkarite party formed by Chandrashekhar Azad—“nor anyone from BSP has visited us,” Santosh Kumar, one of the young men, who was in his twenties, told me. “We have 1,500 votes here. This is a big colony for our community. All the votes here used to go to BSP but for the past time we do not know what is happening in the party,” Anuj Kumar, another of the men, told me.
At Pal’s election office in Meerapur, we spoke to Mintar Pal, who worked on the campaign. “Mithlesh comes from the backward community. She has also given place to the backward communities in her campaign,” Mintar told us. “The dharamshala in which we are sitting belongs to the Saini community”—the Sainis are classified as EBC. “And people of the backward community are campaigning with us. Jats and Gujjars are a little angry, but that will not make any difference,” he said.
But not all EBC communities had been wooed by Mithlesh’s campaign. “Our workers are a little angry with the BJP,” Jai Bhagwan Kashyap, the in-charge of the western Uttar Pradesh campaign for the NISHAD party, which is in alliance with the BJP, said. The party is a political platform for the Nishad community, which is classified as EBC. It had earlier been able to nominate candidates in the Majhawan and Katehari seats, but was not called upon for the by-polls. “The BJP did not give us any seat. When we are going to our people, they are asking us questions about the seat,” Kashyap said. “Apart from this, BJP has not done anything on the question of our reservation.” The Kashyap community, part of the Nishad sub-caste, has been demanding a special reservation among the OBCs. “We, the people of Kashyap community in Meerapur, are angry about this.”
Kashyap or Nishad voters did not usually vote for the RLD, and the NISHAD party had done well in the 2022 and the 2024 elections, he said. “We are asking for votes for Mithlesh in the name of being extremely backward,” Kashyap told us. “But BJP did not do right by our party. Our workers are angry about this.”
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